I do not have a number. I would want decisions to be made that are frequently adjusted and kept up with locality and the times. Those equations would need to include certain basic values: decent safe housing, decent safe food and decent safe healthcare.
Therefore, if one were interested in truth in advertising, one would call that a "decent wage" rather than a "living wage".
Currently that amount is calculated to be, "whatever keeps you off of public assistance," because at that point the corporation is no longer skimming public funds to keep their workforce alive
I.e., the "living wage" concept assumes your conclusion as a premise.
(b) In the centuries before government tried to make sure everybody got enough to eat, did the companies that were able to stay in business pay all their employees that much (adjusted for inflation)?
Oh certainly not. Some of their employees were allowed to <list of bad things snipped> Indeed, companies were able to stay in business through a callous disregard for their employees' lives and health.
Good for you, for finally offering a fact-based analysis.
I'm not sure why you made this comparison if you don't want to compare the practices that comprise the answer to your question.
It's not a comparison; it's a question. But good for you, for not dealing with your ignorance of my motivation by coming up with an obviously incorrect guess and slandering me with it.
Now, however, we've made a sort of a social compact that we want to live in a world where we are not surrounded by starving people and maimed children.
Social compact theory is a steaming pile of dingoes' kidneys that Hobbes made up to justify absolute monarchy; but if you mean we the people have collectively decided we want to live in a world where we are not surrounded by starving people and maimed children and have voted in such a way as to make that happen, then yes, exactly so.
You deny a connection between the forces that have kept minimum wage from growing with productivity and inflation, and with the corporations who are deliberately and willingly asking the public to pay for the gap, while simultaneously fomenting outrage about the "size of the entitlement programs."
Not sure what these things are whose connection I'm supposed to be denying. I haven't heard any corporation ask the public to pay for the gap. My guess is that that's probably an idiosyncratic semantic construction you're putting on your observations of their pay scales, based on once again assuming your conclusion as a premise. But if you can quote a corporation actually asking the public to pay for the gap, go for it. As for the minimum wage, that has been
growing with inflation overall. It's about where it was in the early 60s and again in the 90s; it was higher in the 70s; it was lower in the 50s and for most of the 2000s. But Congress won't index it and prefers to just vote to reset it every few years, which means whether it goes up faster or slower depends on the exact time-frame one chooses.
I believe they want absolutely nothing less than the return to the times when choosing a job was not about getting a good fit and a productive life, but back to when choosing a job (and hence choosing to let good people leave it) was about whether your child woke up the next morning or not.
to answer your later clarification, wherein bomb20 does not see that it is mooching to rely on public assistance to provide a level of employee health (via nutrition, healthcare and housing) that is nevertheless exploited by the employer for profit, I direct you to Canard's answer just above. The employer is getting something that was paid by the taxpayers. Fed, housed and healthy workers. Without that taxpayer contribution, these people would not be what the employer wants to hire.
But the times when choosing a job was about whether your child woke up the next morning or not were the times when employers were, according to Canard's account, getting unhoused, unfed and/or unhealthy workers. So you are making contradictory claims about the sort of workers the employer wants to hire. And it follows from this that at least one of the claims in your argument is
false.
Which brings us full circle. The reason I asked questions (a) and (b) was because you wrote:
"Here's the connection: *this* demand, the one where you want enough food to stay alive, requires that in applying for public assistance you must look for a job. And if you can't find a real job, you are forced to work for a place like Walmart.
So here are your choices.
- land a job with a living wage
- try to get public assistance, which requires you to take any job, even one that will not pay a living wage.
That's the "supply" and "demand" that is actually going on, not some capitalistic utopia supply and demand. It's the one that lets Walmart run their business paying people less than a living wage because the need to get assistance to requires the workers to be indentured like that."
But as you have established with your "Oh certainly not." reply to question (b), companies are in fact able to run their business paying less than your answer to question (a), even when the government doesn't provide public assistance and "indenture" recipients to them. Therefore the pretty sick system you are describing is not, in point of fact, what lets Walmart run their business the way they do. I asked the questions because their answers prove you are basing your accusation of mooching on an argument containing a false claim.
Now let's look at the rest of your arguments.
It seems, if your company is _unable_ to make a satisfactory profit without the government assisting your employees in staying alive through food, medicaid and welfare, then <snip>
But you've established that companies are _able_ to make a satisfactory profit -- what you called "make loads and loads of money" -- without that assistance. So your argument starts out with a false premise from the get-go.
So if you pay employees so little that they cannot afford basic food and housing and medical care, then your business is expecting the government to keep your workers alive.
That doesn't follow. You offered an alternative yourself: the business may have a callous disregard for their employees' lives and health. So you are making the false claim that X implies Y when in fact X does not imply Y.
The "supply and demand" says that the employees **MUST** look for work to receive benefits in many cases. Yet they aren't just getting a low-wage job that is only worth low wages. The Walmart Corp makes MASSIVE profits. The system is forcing these people to take any old job
That's another false claim. A requirement to look for work is not a requirement to take any old job. It's just a requirement to look.
I have a really really large problem with a company making profits - huge profits - while requiring aid from welfare to keep their employees alive.
But as we established in question (a), what you call a "living wage" is what it takes to provide decent safe housing, decent safe food and decent safe healthcare, not what it takes to keep employees alive. You have been equivocating on the term "living wage" -- you are arguing that the government providing a decent lifestyle is something companies "require"; and what you are offering as support for this is the claim that without it the employees will
die. But as you established in answering question (b), companies in fact can get living workers without the government doing that. So you are using a formal fallacy to derive a false lemma.
The point of all these false claims and invalid arguments, plainly, is to pretend a world where we are not surrounded by starving people and maimed children is something employers require, rather than simply something we've decided we want. The reason people paint it that way is because they have a moral judgment in mind: that the bill for that excellent world should be paid by employers. They'd like to have a justification more impressive than "because we want them to pay for it" for this moral judgment. So they need a
moral premise, i.e., a belief that lets them take the is-to-ought step. The premise "People should pay for the services they're using" looks like it could be made to do the job, so they put the judgment and the premise together according to the inference rule "B. A implies B. A must be true." They
want to believe employers require their employees to get government welfare, or that the job is objectively worth a decent wage, or whatever fact will give them an "is" to launch their "is-to-ought" leap from. So they're primed to accept any argument for A no matter how poor it is from the point of view of observation or of formal logic. It's classic wishful thinking. That's why I say the meme you're pushing is really really stupid. Those false claims and invalid arguments aren't
subtle. Over and over again you and the other people endorsing the "mooch" view make arguments full of elementary logic errors and blatant reality avoidance. The meme you're pushing tricks you into not noticing or perhaps not minding how bad your arguments are. In this respect it's no different from Christianity.
Note that none of the foregoing analysis argues that there's anything wrong with making employers pay a decent wage. If the voters want to do that, we can. This is a democracy. As I told ld and he refused to grok, I'm not criticizing your wage demand. Demand what you please. But let's not deceive ourselves about what it is we're doing and why. You said it yourself: we want to live in a world where we are not surrounded by starving people and maimed children.
"We want". The so-called "living wage" is about giving the poor what we want them to have, not about giving them what employers are depending on them to have.
So can you or can you not exhibit an argument that contains no false claims or formal fallacies for why paying employees less than enough for decent safe housing, decent safe food and decent safe healthcare is mooching?
