Thanks for pursuing this discussion. I’m not arguing anything, just pointing out what history shows: the consequence of minimum wage legislation is not to make life livable for workers but rather to send them packing, looking for another job. Which is, somewhat ironically, the same thing they could have done in the first place if they deemed their contribution to productivity to be worth more than they were being paid.
Maybe what some people are being paid isn’t “livable” according to the standards of some politicians, but from whence did politicians derive the expertise to decide this? What constitutes a livable amount of money is highly variable, highly contingent on how one spends what one has. I, for example, live far below the “poverty” line, and life seems good to me … probably because I have learned to detach from consumerism and enjoy the bounties nature provides rather than to be addicted to the faux pleasures offered in shopping malls. I’ve also become debt-free, which is another important escape from modern slavery.
Wages, like prices, are signals to all market participants about the value of what’s being exchanged. When wages no longer indicate value the signals are removed, value becomes invisible, waste becomes rampant and productivity goes in the dumpster (think USSR in this context). What happens in the real world, though, is that when politicians set wages higher than value, the market responds by removing the jobs, replacing them with new technology (have you seen how Amazon is starting a new supermarket where there is no checkout, no cashiers? It’s called Amazon Go.)
Your concern about the prospect of giving money away is well placed on two accounts, but neither has to do with people becoming lazy and listless:
- Those doing the “giving” would be the politicians, who will then have complete control of the people they were supposed to serve. (Remember democracy, where they were supposed to serve us? Yeah, I know, we can already see how that’s fiction, but once they’re handing out money to everybody they won’t even have to pretend anymore.)
- Even more frighteningly, if robots took over the means of production to the extent that humans were not necessary, the robots would control both the politicians and the serfs. Well, okay, maybe having robots ordering us around would be preferable to politicians, but it’s a scary shot in the dark to assume so.
Happily, I doubt that this will come to be. I remember being told in the ’50s that electricity would soon be “too cheap to meter” because of controlled nuclear fusion. How’s that working out so far? And if we can be guided at all by history (those of us who care to read it, anyway), we learn that the consequences of technological advances are never a net loss of things for humans to do, only a shift. Humans seem to have a limitless supply of wants, so there will always be a limitless supply of things for other humans to do in fulfilling them. And to get back to the point, the amount humans get paid for doing whatever they do will need to remain tied to the amount of value they create.
