High wages for unskilled labor, attn GStan

[SickBeast]

You know Rollo, I had similar discussions with a friend of mine who is extremely conservative. I'm sure that a lot of it stems from social conservatism, however he is steadfast in his beliefs and he often espouses his political beliefs and is very opinionated about it. He was talking about the minimum wage. He gave the example of himself as a business owner, wanting to hire someone for $10 an hour, and the worker agreed. He didn't think it was fair for the government to interfere with that and force him to pay the worker a higher wage. What I said to him was that he does definitely have a point there. However when it comes to political policy, they need to consider the "greater good". Large corporations like McDonald's can afford to pay their workers more. There has been study after study and economist after economist in favor of a higher minimum wage. The only people opposed are the businesses, and that is primarily driven by their own greed. I can say the same thing about taxes or progressive taxation in general. On the surface it is incredibly unfair. However you need to see the bigger picture. Without socialism we would have countless millions in our societies starving. I suggest you do some reading about the French revolution and see what happened when Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake". We can't live in a society with such disparity. At least I can't. Same thing with the CEOs. I don't think it's right that they earn $10 million+ salaries while all the other workers are stuck at $30K, struggling to get by.

The way I look at it, you need to see the forest through the trees. You are only seeing the trees. Like I said, on a superficial level you are absolutely 100% correct. However once you look at the bigger picture you will start to see the benefits of these things.

My guess is that you can't, which I find very hard to relate to.

McDonalds and most of the other big corps started out as mom and pop small businesses. McDonalds began as a hot dog stand.

If you legislate a wage small business can't pay:

A. You wipe out the competition, innovation and variety they bring
B. You enslave us all to working for existing large corps and give them more power over us. (We won't be able to start own businesses any longer)

Well, it is being attempted in Ontario, Canada. $15CAD/hour. We will see if their economy collapses. Lately the Canadian economy had been on fire, the feds just raised interest rates this week.