Say Hello to Full Employment

Honestly I would be fine with no minimum wage. I also tend a little more libertarian than most. I am fine with the minimum wage setting a floor to how much people are paid because it cuts down on explotive practices.

That said, putting the minimum wage to an amount that is surviable at 40 hours a week removes people on the margins that would benefit from a job that paid these than a living wage. Note I am taking as a given that a business will only employe someone if they on average produce more benefit than they cost.

Two examples of people on the margin that would otherwise be priced out.

Frank is retired and draws social security he is old and doesn't move as fast any more. He gets a job with the park service cleaning/resetting campgrounds. He enjoys being outside, interacting with campers, and the extra money is nice. Since the service pays per spot cleaned, Frank will never make a living wage. I think Frank should be able to take this job.

James just got done serving 5 years for felony distribution of crack. Seeing his son only once a month has made James decide to go on the straight and narrow from now on. As an ex-con it is hard for him to find a job. In fact because ex-con tend to be bad employees most business don't bother. If there was no minimum wage a business could hire James at a rate of the average ex-con and he could prove himself a good worker and move to a better paying job. I think such a job should exist for James.

I think these are two examples of productive economic activity that would otherwise be impossible if the minimum wage was set to a living wage.

No, but changing the health system so it is cheaper could be workable. Also, if made colleges partially responsible for ensuring loans were repaid it would reduce student debt.

This problem goes pretty deep. Like, down to basic brain function and peoples epistemology. It is far easier for the brain to hang on to binary distinctions, to split things into good and bad. Even if a person looks at a list of 'pros' and 'cons' for making a decision, and decides a certain way is the best solution, they will adamantly refuse to admit or accept the notion that they agreed to bear those 'cons'. They will only admit (even internally to themselves) that they chose to pursue the 'pros'.

If most people were to look at safety only a bit differently, their world outlook would change substantially. If they realized that it is stupendously easy and simple for any of the multitudes of people they come into contact with on a daily basis to kill them, and that no police force in the world could possibly stop such a thing from happening if the person were to decide to do it with no warning, the initial response would probably be fear. But, upon further reflection, they might realize that despite the tremendous ease, despite what others might have gained at any point, it simply has never happened to them. What could possibly explain that? There are ex-convicts, unpleasant people, people with disturbed worldviews, psychopaths, and other 'bad people' everywhere and you've certainly been in contact with them quite regularly. And... you've been, and continue to be, safe.

While it is challenging to keep a human being alive, what with them having all sorts of needs, it is very easy to kill one. Someone walks up to you and pulls out a knife with a 2 inch tiny blade and simply presses it into your jugular and you will most likely die in a minute. Or you could get hit with a car, or something could be put into your food, or your house could be set on fire with you in it, there are innumerable methods that are all easy and entirely within the capability of any normal person. But, killing a human requires something else. It requires the willingness to kill. Almost no one has that. Military training is arduous and difficult because even giving this willingness to the average person is insanely hard to do (and they settle for simply ingraining killing as a reflex response since they have never actually accomplished manufacturing the actual will, so soldiers typically kill before their conscious mind can decide what to do, taking their will out of the equation, resulting in neurological damage that manifests as PTSD but that's another topic). To presume that even a "bad person" runs around with this willingness constantly within them is quite ludicrous once you've faced the reality of how rare it is for such violence to occur.

And then when you look at the violence which does occur, and try to understand it, what makes those situations so different, you quickly notice that essentially all occur in situations of desperation. You might be led to suspect that perhaps the desperation is more the problem rather than the persons involved. Perhaps the 'bad people' who didn't kill anybody the day before or the day after aren't simply murder machines who will always be a threat.

This all, however, requires a great deal of thinking. And thinking about emotionally arousing topics at that. Life, death, the uncertainty of strangers, the fragility of ones own situation, etc. Before you can begin down the road of thinking about these things, you have to know how to think. And you have to be willing to think. Both of those factors are in substantially short supply in modern society. The knowing how to think because we don't teach it in schools (the Republican Party in Texas actually had opposition to the teaching of critical thinking skills as a primary plank in their official party platform not long ago) save in college philosophy courses. The willingness due to a total reliance upon intuition as a guide to truth. Intuition can not deal with these topics at all. It arises from the 'default behavior' of our brains which arises from their structure that evolved to keep us alive (just) in small tribes on the African savannah. It is prone to obsession with fear, and fearing the unknown, and fleeing from threats rather than facing or dealing with them. Until a person can turn their back on intuition and use reason instead, the monstrous 'bad people' will be a constant bugaboo.

My worst fear, the Worst Case Scenario that I see as being depressingly possible, is that the spread of automation will result in nonsense jobs. That our society is so completely wedded to the idea that everything of value must be gained through suffering and that this is the right and proper course of the universe that companies will be compelled to employ certain numbers of human workers despite there not being any actual need. 'Having a job' is not a natural, or necessarily fundamentally desired, state. Not for the individual, or for wider society. It was a purely utilitarian solution arrived at in the past when pressures were different. When pressures change, social practices have to change too, or the result is always bad. Concentrating on making sure everyone has a job while arduously fighting to ensure that workers are paid as little as possible can get us back to the era before the New Deal. I see nothing that would prevent that. Entire families, youth included (though likely not children, but certainly adolescents), working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and barely being able to feed themselves.

When all of society is willing to say "they don't deserve more pay, the machines are doing all the work" including the workers themselves, and 'being employed' is seen as some sort of moral imperative that is more meaningful than a paycheck and totally detached from actually producing value... things can get bad. We should always remember history, and that those people were not fundamentally different from us. They were willing to bear it. We will be too. And while they didn't have a century of fighting against 'socialist' policies so were willing to discuss the New Deal, we are in a different situation on that count. Such a solution would not be discussed seriously, much less attempted.

(But, I don't fear this too much. The fact is technology is cheap and has made people so productive that its far more likely they will realize that companies no longer provide any tangible benefit compared to working directly for customers online, especially once the software is there to facilitate it.)