There is an enormous amount of chatter about what should be the minimum wage. Should it be “x” amount or should it not? And if not, then what.
Should it be market driven? Determined by the locale? Is the minimum wage really only for part time workers or young workers?
And what is a living wage? Should the minimum wage reflect a living wage?
And if you had add in the problem of the wealth and pay gap between the different economic strata in our society, how do you determine a minimum wage or a living wage? And how do you even determine what constitutes a living wage?
Or so what? Is it every person for them self? And this last question is the easiest to answer. If you believe that we should group together as a society and accept laws, rules and mores to create cohesiveness, order and social interactions, then we cannot accept every person for them self. We are not animals in a jungle. And if you do not like this answer then separate yourself from humanity, do not intermingle with us at all, or complain about us and live in the jungle or a deserted island. And you do not have to bother to tell me how it is going.
As humans it appears to be in our nature to be social and interdependent animals. Oops, changed paths too much.
Going back to do we need a minimum wage or even a government defined minimum wage. As always if humans behaved at their best we would not need government at all, yet we rarely behave at our best so we need some entity to control our interactions. We shouldn’t, but we do.
So until we do, we need some type of defined attributes to how labor is paid in our country. And let me say this, the minimum wage arguments really need to be discussed throughout the globe. It maybe different for different countries, but if you want to benefit society as a whole then all humans need to see the same arguments resolved.
This is already running much longer than I wanted it to be so this may end up in stages or parts.
So lets back away from the immediate answer about what dollar figure we say is minimum wage and discuss what is needed for people who work.
And that is actually a hard question to answer. At what point is a person self sufficient in society? How much money is needed to pay bills? And that depends. We can all, if we try, get away with very basic necessities. We could live in an efficiency, keep our thermostats at low temps in the winter and high temps in the heat or even where more or less clothes depending on the weather. We could eat very inexpensive food. And oops this is where the push me pull me of making choices comes into play. And this is my first example of the problems we face in making arbitrary financial determinations.
If you eat inexpensive foods over your life time, in most cases in our modern society they are unhealthy. So if you are not making much, and are eating these unhealthy foods eventually they can cause health problems and some of these health problems could end up very debilitating and expensive such as diabetes. And now you cannot work at all.
So if you are not making much then you probably couldn’t afford health insurance. And if you cannot afford health insurance and then who pays for your medical care. Do we as a society let you die a slow painful inhumane death? Well of course not, but now we are at one example of how determining a wage for a person one day may have detrimental costs another day, both to the person and to society.
I am going to leave it for you to think about it for now. And I could leave you with a litany of questions to reflect upon and how all this interconnects. For now though give it some thought and hopefully some questions come into your head so you can start to develop an idea that all this minimum wage talk is crap, there is so much more to the discussion. And hopefully you realize that for us to make good answers we need good understanding. I do not profess to have all the answers, yet I am going to delve into this further in future posts because we should make this discussion a real priority in our society otherwise creating an arbitrary number to pay people solves no problems.
Cheers
I forgot to create a bracket and I am mad at myself, still love March Madness though. And in some ways glad I didn’t because Friday was crazy. I hope you enjoy one of the greatest events of sports entertainment around.
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