Minimum Wage: What's the Other Argument?

[Mise]

I don't know what a tree service is, but assuming they cut down a tree, then they're saying "i'll cut down this tree if you give me some money", and you're saying "sure", and then they're cutting down the tree and you're giving them some money. That's what is actually happening.

 

[Farm Boy]

In my case they'd be saving me the time and possibility of injury it would take me to cut down the tree and process it myself.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

In my case they'd be saving me the time and possibility of injury it would take me to cut down the tree and process it myself.

That's the bottom line. The tree is going to consume time. Either my time, or someone else's time which I am obliged to purchase.

 

[Mise]

In my case they'd be saving me the time and possibility of injury it would take me to cut down the tree and process it myself.

Yeah, they're saving you time, in the sense that you no longer have to spend time to do something. "Saving time" and "spending time" are figurative descriptions for doing or not doing something. You're not literally taking time and keeping it, nor taking time and spending it. The doing or not doing something is the thing that actually happens; it's a real thing, not a figurative thing. This real thing is what you're really paying for, in real life. The figurative thing might be how we conceptualise it and think about it sometimes, and it's useful to help us make decisions about whether we want to pay someone to chop down a tree, or do it ourselves. But the thing that we're actually paying for is the chopping down of a tree. That's what actually got done, was it not? That's what actually happened? That's what the tree service people actually did? In real life?

 

[Farm Boy]

In real life, instead of sawing down the tree, I got to take my kid to the park. Or learn something. Or have a quiet moment with the wife(or not quiet! ). I only have so many total moments at my disposal, one at a time. I spend them on whatever activity I choose amongst those available. I can do things I want to do, I can do things I feel I need to do, or I can trade those moments for things I would rather not do but which people will trade me back for. I can trade my time for their time. Now, the part El Mac is getting into is how to keep the system functioning when the market is quite happy to have me trade massive amounts of my moments for what costs other people very few moments or perhaps no moments at all. They might be getting my moments in trade for moments their parents or grandparents invested and they inherited.

 

[Mise]

Yeah, you can conceptualise it like that - it's really quite a useful thing to do - but that doesn't mean you are literally buying someone when you pay them to cut down a tree.

 

[Farm Boy]

I've purchased their effort for a segment of their life. I'm not buying ownership or self-determination rights from them anymore than I'm actually buying the flesh of their hands, but I've still traded for something of theirs that has a core human value.

 

[Mise]

Okay, so what you mean when you say "I am buying a human being" is "I am buying something that has value to a human being, in exchange for something that (presumably) has more value to that same human being". I don't disagree with that. But this whole stupid thing started because (primarily) Borachio and Traitorfish were claiming that this is exploitative. It's possible that certain elements of employment are exploitative, or at least undesirable. But fortunately, those same legal fictions that define what "human labour", "purchasing", "selling", etc means also have real actual consequences. Some of those consequences specifically prevent some potential exploitative elements of employment. But if "humans are bought and sold by employers", then employment per se is exploitative. The act of buying and selling humans is inherently and inextricably exploitative. OTOH, if what you're saying is true, and "buying a human" means "informed, consenting adults exchanging something of value to each other", then this isn't necessarily or inherently exploitative. It may be, but it doesn't need to be in order for it to happen.

Now, what El Mac is talking about is (I think) something different. He's not talking about the potentially exploitative aspects of employment. He's talking (I believe) about rent seeking. The exploitation there is of people without access to productive assets by people with exclusive access to them. The latter group (unproductively) seek to exploit the surplus value of the people who use their productive assets without doing anything productive with it themselves. That's a different thing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, El Mac.

 

[Farm Boy]

Aside from the flesh on your bones and the substances your body produces when biologically fueled, you have one meaningful commodity to trade and give. The segment of your life, represented by time, that it takes to convert physical, mental, and emotional effort into something of value to yourself, to another, or to both. You can buy a person for an hour, and they can be happy and powerful actors within this deal. You can also buy a person for an hour, pay somebody other than themselves, and they can have no meaningful say in turning it down. As we slide away from me trading you 20 minutes of my life to save you 40 of yours(specialization!) and you trade me back 10 minutes of your life to save me 60 of mine(since you're such an educated and skillful fella), and us being happy with it, we'll start sliding towards you providing me with a week's worth of your employees' time in return for part of one summer's toil from my 15 healthiest slaves.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Back to what I said, now that we are settled that buying someone's time is not the same as buying them outright...which was never my contention.

You, me, the next guy, and Alice Walton each get the same 24 hours in a day. This is the 'vein' in our respective 'time mines'. I contend that no matter who the person is, if you are going to purchase eight ours of their time in order to make "better" use of your own they should be guaranteed to get enough for that time that they can enjoy the sixteen hours they have kept for themselves. If anyone has time that is of less value than that the system under which time is exchanged is in need of repair.

 

[El_Machinae]

I already covered that this thread. The real minimum wage is 2000 calories per day. And there's no getting around it.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I already covered that this thread. The real minimum wage is 2000 calories per day. And there's no getting around it.

Understood. And if you keep slaves you have to feed them.

The question is whether there is any reason to accept this real minimum as the standard? Particularly as a locked in status for a segment of the population?

 

[Mise]

Right, so what the two of you are arguing is entirely different from what Traitorfish (I'm fairly certain) and Borachio (I guess) are arguing. What you two are saying is, essentially, a restatement of the basic principles of market economies, with the "liberal" addendum that this market ought to be structured in a way that doesn't lead to gross inequality or human suffering. A more complete version might be that it ought to maximise liberty given Rawls's veil of ignorance and original position, and a proper, holistic definition of liberty. This is my position as well.

What TF is arguing is that capitalism is fundamentally flawed, because such a thing simply cannot exist within a market economy. He's arguing for a socialist economy, and he's using the notion that market economies actually buy and sell human beings to support that. This is neither of your positions, and my arguments here thus far have been directed at this criticism.

 

[El_Machinae]

Understood. And if you keep slaves you have to feed them.

The question is whether there is any reason to accept this real minimum as the standard? Particularly as a locked in status for a segment of the population?

I see it as a ginormous failure of our system. In the 1780s, a semi-literate, semi-numerate person could get a reasonably good job with a rather good wage. Nowadays, for some reason, this person could very easily get less (in real terms) than his counterpart.

I'd not call this progress. The pay for a level of human capital should only rise over time, along with economic growth. Else we've failed.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Right, so what the two of you are arguing is entirely different from what Traitorfish (I'm fairly certain) and Borachio (I guess) are arguing. What you two are saying is, essentially, a restatement of the basic principles of market economies, with the "liberal" addendum that this market ought to be structured in a way that doesn't lead to gross inequality or human suffering. A more complete version might be that it ought to maximise liberty given Rawls's veil of ignorance and original position, and a proper, holistic definition of liberty. This is my position as well.

What TF is arguing is that capitalism is fundamentally flawed, because such a thing simply cannot exist within a market economy. He's arguing for a socialist economy, and he's using the notion that market economies actually buy and sell human beings to support that. This is neither of your positions, and my arguments here thus far have been directed at this criticism.

However, I agree with Traitorfish that capitalism contains the same fundamental flaw that all economic systems contain (he may specify it as unique to capitalism where I do not, but it is the same flaw). Any systematic disbursement of commodities will, over time, concentrate benefit to ever increasing degree until those who are on the wrong end opt to destroy the system.

Whether the system is outright slavery (I grant you the bare minimum of your life, in the form of this food, in exchange for command of your time) or the current world of capitalist employment (I grant you the bare minimum of your life, in the form of this wage which will sustain you for the day, in exchange for the command of your time) or the feudal system (I grant you the bare minimum of your life, in the form of allowing you a survival share of the produce of my estate, in exchange for command of your time) it always comes down to the people who have nothing to show for their life but their life saying "Screw you! You need my life more than I do, so take it if you can."

If we are smart we will look for ways to avoid the situation coming to that, but we have no heritage of being smart in that regard, as evidenced by that being how every economic system has ended.

 

[Farm Boy]

I already covered that this thread. The real minimum wage is 2000 calories per day. And there's no getting around it.

You're thinking individually sustainable minimum wage. The hardcapped minimum wage is, ''If you do this, you get an abeyance on me beating you to death right now.'' Parasitic economies are a thing.

 

[onejayhawk]

That is the crux of the question, sustainability. The minimum wage for entry into the labor pool is less than for sustaining a person. Completely separate is the discussion of "living wage". There was a thread on that subject last year. Living wage, as commonly used in political discussion, is middle class.

Minimum wage discussions involve all three, which is confusing.

J

 

[Borachio]

Okay, so what you mean when you say "I am buying a human being" is "I am buying something that has value to a human being, in exchange for something that (presumably) has more value to that same human being". I don't disagree with that. But this whole stupid thing started because (primarily) Borachio and Traitorfish were claiming that this is exploitative. It's possible that certain elements of employment are exploitative, or at least undesirable. But fortunately, those same legal fictions that define what "human labour", "purchasing", "selling", etc means also have real actual consequences. Some of those consequences specifically prevent some potential exploitative elements of employment. But if "humans are bought and sold by employers", then employment per se is exploitative. The act of buying and selling humans is inherently and inextricably exploitative. OTOH, if what you're saying is true, and "buying a human" means "informed, consenting adults exchanging something of value to each other", then this isn't necessarily or inherently exploitative. It may be, but it doesn't need to be in order for it to happen.

Now, what El Mac is talking about is (I think) something different. He's not talking about the potentially exploitative aspects of employment. He's talking (I believe) about rent seeking. The exploitation there is of people without access to productive assets by people with exclusive access to them. The latter group (unproductively) seek to exploit the surplus value of the people who use their productive assets without doing anything productive with it themselves. That's a different thing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, El Mac.

I'd agree that exchanging services with one another isn't necessarily exploitative. For instance, I could agree with a plumber that he's better at plumbing than I am, while I'm better at, say, gardening (undoubtedly untrue but nevermind for the purposes of illustration). So we could agree that one of us doing all the gardening and the other doing all the plumbing, for both of us, would be mutually beneficial.

What is exploitative though, imo, is someone's who's good at neither plumbing nor gardening employing both the plumber and myself and selling our services for profit on the open market to other people. Now, even that isn't necessarily exploitative if the person doing that happens to be remarkably better than the plumber or me at finding good plumbing and gardening opportunities and takes a cut proportional to the time he spends and related to his skills in such an ill-defined profession. But I'm willing to gamble (not being a gambling person) that in 99% of cases, it does turn out to be exploitative, as that person doing the arranging - or subbing the arranging out to yet another person (for a zillion plumbers and gardeners) - becomes increasingly richer and richer as time goes by.

It's in the nature of the beast of capitalism, I think. And I fail utterly to see how this gives rise to a desirable state of affairs in the field of human relationships.

(Oh, and thanks btw for giving me half credit for starting this "stupid thing". It makes me feel quite proud. )

 

[cardgame]

Raise it.

Inflation, oh nooooooooo!

 

[onejayhawk]

Raise it.

Unemployment, oh nooooooooo!

FIFY

J