Politics & Rants

Minimum Wage Bullshit Explained

So we were tooling around the bowels of the internet today, and noticed that mewling harpy Elizabeth Warren was staggering around like a group home reject, clanging pans together and demanding we raise the minimum wage to something ridiculous.

Our first reaction was... "let the insipid cunt have her way." It will mostly hurt the poor morons who support Warren, and would roundly nut-punch the Chamber of Commerce - a school of sharks who deserve to be violated, skinned alive and stuffed screaming into a burn barrel. (The order of that is negotiable).

Reflexive anger and revenge porn aside, this got us thinking on the reality of minimum wage hikes, and how the millennials have never been presented with the whole picture - thanks government education! So buckle up constant readers... class is in session. Let's learn what your worthless economics instructors in the Prog-Nazi indoctrination camps never bothered to teach...

In the ideal world, your pay reflects the danger, difficulty and misery of a given job - as well as your personal talent. If it's an easy, safe job that is reasonably comfortable, then the compensation should be low. If the job is awful, dangerous or extremely difficult, it should pay well. Exceptionally gifted people should be able to monetize their assets to whatever degree the system will tolerate - they are better than other people, thus they are WORTH MORE. (Fifty million sub-par humans reared on Barny and plastic trophies for sixth place just cried out in horror!).

If the world worked the way it was supposed to, free market competition and companies battling against one another would push wages and benefits upwards - the corporations fight for access to labor with the skills, talent and fortitude to do their work. However... somewhere along the line, it was discovered that rather than competing in this arena, the mega-corps could coordinate, fix wages, import herds of foreign slaves and capture the state and federal regulatory agencies, - lowering wages across the board and keeping them so.

But this is not occurring in a vacuum. There are other villains afoot...

The federal reserve is helping fuel the fire, as they continue to devalue America's currency. This is in reality a stealth form of taxation, done at the behest of our political caste, who role-play Santa Clause to their constituencies, but are too callow to overtly tax we-the-peasants. Rather than openly taking the money necessary to pay for their vote buying and pandering, the shit-weasels secure loans from other nations, grant IOU's to themselves and conjure new money from nothing. This causes the cost of tangibles to rise, and puts further pressure on corporations to cut production costs and battle margin compression - it's a self feeding cycle.

Minimum wage mandates by the government are an attempt to cope with symptoms rather than the disease. They won't cause in a betterment of the worker's position overall - they will result in more offshoring, fewer jobs and more automation. This is because FedGovCo tends to go overboard with every edict - the result is compensation greater the the value of the job. An extremely low skill job is never going to be truly worth a living wage. Nor is it fair to demand thus - as all value in this world derives from scarcity. When almost any person, (including the mentally and physically defective), can do a job, it's value to society is low. The putative masters in Washington D.C. cannot artificially force this reality to change. What they will ensure is that fry-cooks are replaced by robots, assembly line jobs will be shipped to Asia, and touch-screens will crop up in lieu of waiters. The fraction who remain employed will gain, this is certain, but the act will hurt the greater balance terminated - and the entire nation when prices rise to compensate for the expenditures. (Did we did mention that costs incurred by companies are reflected in the price of goods and services?)

A quick mental exercise:

So your politicians have raised the minimum wage... costs rise, the low-skill workforce is fired in swaths, and they've created a new wave to pile atop the ninety-three-million people enjoying "funemployment" in the FUSA. The price of products now inflates for everybody, (which eats into the meager savings of the old and the herd of newly minted poor). What now? What's to be done with the horrible mess the government made? Price controls? Mandated hiring? Government rationing? Federalizing companies? Seizing assets? Overt centralized wealth redistribution?

Google Venezuela to see how well that's working out - and get used to fist-fights in the street over toilet paper rolls.

The root of this problem is our government - it's too powerful, and it's facilitating the malfeasance of these corporatist swine. Our "Civil Servants" allow the coordinated wage-fixing by "competing" companies. It willfully grants these entities ownership of the regulatory state - which is used it to DESTROY upstarts who might otherwise drive up the value of labor. The over-empowered government has been twisted into a fucking protectionist racket, existing entirely for the purpose of crafting regulation to benefit corporations at the expense of anyone challenging their de-facto monopolies. The manipulation of the currency feeds into the downward pressure on wages and makes it HARDER for everyone to live by raising the cost of goods.

Jacking the minimum wage will repair none of that. Rather than patching the hole, it's bailing water from the titanic. The government needs to be neutered until it's no longer the Mega-Corp's gate-keeper. The Federal Reserve Bank must stop devaluing the currency - so a few bucks can buy something of value. Along with that, the politicians need to grow the testicles to actually pay for their vote buying and crony hand-outs via open taxation, (rather than gutlessly hiding it through loans and currency manipulation).

(Now comes the part where we shit on everything).

Ahhh wasn't that fanciful? The above necessities would be painful for all parties in the oligarchy - which is exactly why none of what we just said will ever happen. Pain of that magnitude will only come if the government is overthrown and replaced. Expecting this system to allow repair though it's own processes is like asking syphilis to self-cure. Furthermore, begging Leviathan to peacefully release it's unjustly seized might is also fiction. The gentry spent more than a century perverting the United States Government into it's personal attack dog. They'll only relinquish the leash at bayonet point.

Options dwindle. Time grows short. You ought to spend it preparing.