The idea and policy of Minimum Wage (MW) is an area of particular study for me. Since my politics have shifted further and further left, I have noticed how businesses (and therefore capitalists) argue against paying their employees a living wage. Time and again, I would see the same assumptions and pleas to common sense brought up, and I would think to myself, “Self, is that assumption true?” When a business owner claims that raising the Minimum Wage will cost jobs, for example, the skeptic in me counters with “does it?”
The idea and policy of Minimum Wage (MW) is an area of particular study for me. Since my politics have shifted further and further left, I have noticed how businesses (and therefore capitalists) argue against paying their employees a living wage. Time and again, I would see the same assumptions and pleas to common sense brought up, and I would think to myself, “Self, is that assumption true?” When a business owner claims that raising the Minimum Wage will cost jobs, for example, the skeptic in me counters with “does it?”
What I would see is arguments against minimum Wage that treated the policy like it was some untested theory. In fact, that is not true. Since MW was implemented 80 years ago, we now have a large body of real-world examples to examine after the fact. We should, therefore, be able to tell what effects the MW caused. Actual effects on existing economies. These aren’t theories, and we don’t have to rely on thought-experiments or common sense. We can base our judgments of MW on reality.
Reality’s Left-Wing Bias
Crazy, I know. Reality, as has often been claimed, has a left-wing bias. Science and observation are not really in vogue among a large group of leaders and policy-makers, not mention a significant segment of our population. And yet, here I am, arguing for those very qualities. Clearly, I am a communist.
I have a lot of notes stashed away from paying attention to what pundits have to say about Minimum Wage. I’ve shared a few here and there. I’m not sure my daily 500-1000 words is the right place to lay some of them out; but someday, I will write that article (or book; there’s more than enough material for the idea). An article with lots of citations would take more effort than I have this lazy, rainy, Sunday morning. I’d rather expound on my own ideas and philosophy regarding the topic and why it’s important to me.
OK, first of all, morally I’m against the whole idea of wages (it’s true: I am anti-capitalist. There. I said it.) There are fundamental needs that every human being requires for life: food, shelter, healthcare. Young or old, rich or poor, everyone needs those things, at all times as they move from birth, through life, to death. To say that one person gets X amount of dollars to pay for their basic needs, but another person gets X times 2 (or times 10, or times 300) to pay for them is essentially putting a price on some lives and not others.
You can’t have a housing market at the same time as eliminating homelessness, to take one example. Because if you give everyone a home, there’s no point in buying and selling homes and making a profit from it. If every human life is worth the same amount (as I believe), there’s no point to paying janitors less for their labor than programmers—or paying women and people of color much less than white men. It’s all a scam, a flim-flam, a shuck-and-jive, and I loathe it.
Onward To The Future
But that’s not the world in which I currently live, is it? While I can dream and work towards a better future, I need to pay attention to the real world. That’s where all this started. I can’t complain about right-wing pundits ignoring the effects of a policy that has been in place for decades, while also complaining that the world doesn’t conform to my moral views.
Minimum Wage is a compromise policy to me—a stepping stone along the path from pure capitalist-class economics towards a more human-centric and equitable society. If people can band together and push the minimum Wage higher, and get it implemented in more and more places, then the next step would be to pay everyone a minimum wage, regardless of their having a job or not. This idea is called Universal Basic Income (UBI), and it has been in place in some countries and regions. There are folks in the United States that are advocating for it, too. That would set the absolute lowest bar for any adult human being: you are worth at least this much. Ideally, it would pay enough that everyone could afford a place to live, food to eat, and healthcare; the base needs everyone shares.
The next step along that axis would be for the government or society to grant those basic needs, without requiring an income with which to pay it. It sounds looney-tunes, doesn’t it? And yet, that is the economic idea behind Star Trek’s utopian United Federation of Planets, the invisible background story on which the ideals of infinite diversity and radical equality were founded. Everyone had the freedom to do as they wished—everyone, raised by the richness of society above the base level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
That is my utopian dream. I’m well-read enough, however, to know that utopias rarely exist for long, if at all. But ain’t it pretty to think about?