The only certainty of a reduced minimum wage is a lot more poor people | Van Badham | Comment is free

It's absurd to claim that US businesses have more regulations and more worker protections and a higher minimum wage than Australia. Every one of those is contradictory too reality.

Apparently you don't live in reality; the US is ranked higher than Australia in this study in terms of regulations (see page 39 specifically and more generally figures 7-14).

Even so, America has fewer workers rights laws and a lower minimum wage, however those are obviously much less important factors than are things like property rights, trade freedom, government size/spending, in determining what is and is not a free market. These are not particularly controversial basic metrics of economic freedom, being understood as indicators of "free markets", "laissez-faire", "robber baron economics" (or however one wants to spin it) going back to the time of Adam Smith.

The basic fact is that America is less capitalist then it once was, and far less capitalist than people would like to think. Of course, what some people would like to think has no bearing on what the rest of us are plased to call "reality". This wilfull ignorance is necessary to avoid the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise be experienced by those who promote a narrative that places business on one side and workers on another; a narrative which has no basis in actual fact, and one which, despite our short memories, tragically led to a great deal of starvation in certain huge countries over the course of the 20th century.

/r/australia Thread Link - theguardian.com