Wages for political positions in Taco government

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NutAgain!

Trad climber

South Pasadena, CA

Topic Author's Original Post - Aug 26, 2016 - 08:00pm PT

Should there be a minimum wage? Or should we let market forces decide?

I was about to come out against minimum wage (even though I am ideologically closely aligned with Bernie in most other things), because I can clearly see the consequences of hurting small businesses that can't afford it, and reducing the number of people employed, and exacerbating the problem of less than full time employment so companies can avoid paying for benefits. I took economics in college, and that part at least follows pretty rational math modeling reason.

Then I started thinking about the end game. Raising minimum wage will accelerate the adoption of automation technologies, and then what do we do when a few rich people own everything and they have no need to hire employees? It's like the end game of playing the board game Monopoly. Only people's lives are at stake- you don't get to just say "game over" and go on with regular life. Full on sci-fi people living artificial utopia behind protected walls while grimy dirty starving people are killing themselves and each other trying to get in.

So increasing minimum wage is a step in the direction of paying people to do nothing, a statement that it is a human right to have a baseline income regardless of merit. This seems like such a foreign and weird thing...

Ultimately I don't think a minimum wage is the right way to solve the problem... at least not foisting it onto businesses directly. It disproportionately burdens small businesses that don't have enough profit to absorb the added cost.

I think the right way to solve it is a federally administered system where people get a living wage in exchange for doing work that benefits society but is not profitable for private industry. The money can be distributed through direct employment in government positions, and in private contracts where headcount and wage and benefits are directly tied to project funding. Argue all you want about people not working efficiently, but it would be better than having 99% unemployment and giving people unemployment checks for doing truly nothing. It would create at least a facade of people being needed and having an identity, deterring crime somewhat if nothing else. But would clearly be able to generate other societal benefits.

Examples of industries where private funding has less incentive but the public good would be served include:

long term science research

environmental cleanup

parks and recreation

arts and humanities

Imagine (not so) far into the future where there are only jobs required for 1% of the population. A way to keep a societal balance would be to have outrageously high progressive taxes, going toward 99% for billionaires. Then the government would be able to provide for the people, so they had enough money to purchase the products that generate the profits. If this doesn't happen, the only source of income for people to buy the products (so the rich folks can profit more) will be crime, until that breaks down because a big pile of dogs eating each other will eventually lose biomass and nothing will be left.

But thinking about it from a game theory perspective makes me very pessimistic. Any country that tries to think about the long term well-being of humanity and civilization will fail, because other short-sighted countries can continue economic policies that attract businesses, and they will out-compete the countries that are trying to think about the future of mankind.

The only way for this situation to change is to have every country on Earth operating with similar policies for human rights and standards of living. Changing that requires the laws and treaties between nations to support equal standards of human rights and economic standards of living. That's not going to happen any time soon. People in affluent countries (myself included) are too addicted to the benefits to give them up. But ironically, holding on to this addiction may ultimately be our collective undoing.

I don't have clear answers, but I see clear threats that we are not as a society effectively considering or addressing. We are very close to the point (if not already there) where corporations have so much wealth and power that they can make traditional geographical governments irrelevant, or hopelessly mired in being puppets of the corporations. On the other side, I have read Animal Farm and Atlas Shrugged and I'm presently absorbed in Milan Kundera's "Laughter and Forgetting" which makes me fear the idealist socialist movements that somehow get overrun by the same types of malicious forces that oppress society.

The trickiest part seems to be managing the transition from where our society functions best in a market-based system, and how much to supplement with government jobs and higher taxes as the need for human labor reduces over time.

But I digress. For Taco political positions, how does $15/hr sound?