The other night during President Obama’s sixth State of the Union address, he told the Congress, “If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.” Which, of course, received a standing ovation from the Democrats and the Republicans proceeded to faintly tap with their pinky fingers as they rolled their elitist eyes into the back of their privileged heads.
Guess what, the minimum wage is supposed to be a living wage. Anyone who works 40 hours a week should be able to provide a good home for themselves and their family, or in some cases, their friends. They shouldn’t be living in poverty. They shouldn’t be spending their entire paycheck on their bills.
So yes, I told you should STFU…
Instead, you choose to insult the burger flippers and the counter clerks, as if your alien-meat Big Mac somehow makes you superior to the people who worked hard to make sure that your lunch was prepared in a relatively clean environment and served to you in a prompt manner. If it wasn’t for the Jane Doe you look down upon, you’d have had to make your own fucking burger.
Do you, for whatever reason, think being able to navigate Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Excel make you important? It doesn’t. The human race survived for thousands of years without being subjected to PowerPoint. We survived without computers. We even survived without the Internet! Shocking, I know. The human race built an industrial world without any electricity.
You know what’s more important than Microsoft Outlook? Being able to grow a crop and bring it to your local farmer’s market. If you take away people that have those skills, we all starve. You know what else is important? Good plumbing, especially for those of you who eat those precious Big Macs and have explosive shits. Without clean water, our society dies of cholera and typhus.
You know what else is more important? People in service industries. Those brave souls make it possible for you to have a clean room in the hotel, a meal served to you in a restaurant, a ride to the airport, and all the other thousands of little chores that you and I take for granted.
They are not your drop-outs, they are not your slaves, and they sure as hell are not your servants! They are your partners in a technological civilization. They make it possible for you to live inside your tiny little bubble, isolated from the daily diatribes of existence.
The diatribes that you, you piece of shit, think you have the right to be abusive to any other human being for any reason at all. That reveals more about the failure of your parents to teach you basic social skills and your own lack of compassion for your fellow human beings than it says about anything else that falls out of your mouth as an “opinion.”
Yes, I’m angry and yes I’m being negative. What’s new?
People were beaten in the thirties and forties by corporate asshats so you could have a forty-hour work week, a weekend, access to public education, social security, and other benefits hard won by the labor movement. The only thing you are required to say to that burger flipper or that counter clerk is simply, “Thanks!” And mean it!
Telling them that you disapprove of their life choices is not an item on the $1 menu. And if it were — you couldn’t afford it. Because, you’re an asshole. And if you think I’m wrong, take the President’s advice by living on $15,000 because you think it’s possible.
About the Author: Brad Gilligan
This article doesn’t really make a lot of sense other than just being an appeal to emotion based on some implicit morality that you think ought to be practiced without regard for the actual economics and what a minimum wage actually means and does.
1. I dispute the need that a 40 hour a week paycheck entitles someone to any type of existence. Something including labor is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. The fact that someone has labored shouldn’t be a free pass to living at all much less comfortably. If one dedicates his time to a fruitless efforts then he should not expect fruit at the end of it.
2. Minimum wage doesn’t actually guarantee anyone a job. It just structures incentives such that low wage, low skill jobs are eliminated as much as they can be through automation, packaging the responsibilities with higher skill jobs, etc… What does this do? It just makes sure that the least employable people in society are even less employable. Good job yuppie do-gooders, you just harmed the group of people you were trying to help!
What’s next a minimum wage for free lance writers, artists, and small business owners? Surely they should be able to support themselves and their families if they are making an honest effort in their respective works. Only problem with that is there is no one to pay them but the welfare system, do we just make it illegal for them to pursue their dreams unless they can prove to a government audit they can make more than minimum wage?
Basic economics tells us minimum wage creates labor surpluses (unemployment). The hysteria around raising minimum wage is ridiculous. Minimum wage needs to be eliminated. First because people aren’t entitled to any sort of existence and second because it destroys opportunity by limiting both employee and employee choice by distorting natural market incentives. Opportunity that would allow businesses to invest in people.
Opportunity that would provide the most disadvantaged groups in society the ability to contribute to society in meaningful ways and develop valuable skills to bid their wage up.
People in society would be better off if the meglomaniacs stopped trying to engineer society to their specifications. Let individuals decide what interactions work best for them rather than bullying them into only accepting ones that please your moral conscience.