Doc Freemo 
Sure, as long as that rent is a shared room, and the groceries consist of chicken every night... which you can off a minimum wage job.
@freemo @MikeDunnAuthor Minimum wage is supposed to be a living wage. Frankly, food and housing should be freely available to all, but at an absolute fucking minimum, a person working full time should be able to afford their own place and decent food, which is completely impossible at min wage in the US right now. Fuck the protestant work ethic and the religious fanatics it rode in on.
> Minimum wage is supposed to be a living wage
and it shouldn't be, thats the point. It disproportionately harms the poorest least skilled of the work force, it shouldnt exist at all, let alone act as a living wage.
> Frankly, food and housing should be freely available to all
Absolutely agree it should be, and minimum wage should also be abolished.
> but at an absolute fucking minimum, a person working full time should be able to afford their own place and decent food
Only if that full time is **worth** decent food and your own place. People deserve food and an education to be able to gaint he skills to be worth a home and decent food, it is not the obligation of anyone paying someone money to do a task to provide that. It is the governments responsibility to create a healthy economy and valuable workers through access to free education, training, and sometimes welfare.
> which is completely impossible at min wage in the US right now
Entirely possible, for people who are skilled enough to be worth the income needed to afford these things. The fact that many people exist who do not have sufficiently marketable skills is the problem needing solving, not minimum wage.
> Fuck the protestant work ethic and the religious fanatics it rode in on.
Has nothing to do with work ethic, bother understanding a persons position first.
@freemo @rootfake @MikeDunnAuthor how abolishing minimum wage will amek the situation any better? Minimum wage doesn't limit employer from paying more but only paying less.
Because we already know from the data that minimum wage causes the poorest least skilled to not be able to find work, typically replaced by more skilled individuals. You can see the attached graph from a peer reviewed journal demonstrating this.
In addition to the data clearly showing this fact, its also common sense. Companies hire people based on the value they provide. If you dont provide enough value to be worth your wage, you wont get a job. Setting a minimum wage just makes it illegal to hire people who do not produce value great enough to be worth their hourly rate. The end result is you effectively make it illegal to hire the least skilled in society, forcing people who are already desperate and need work, and who dont make enough to loose their job entirely and be unhirable, effectively causing them to starve to death.
Obviously that is not a solution, it only makes their situation worse. Both the established scientific data, as well as just basic common sense clearly shows this.
Now how do you actually solve the problem, easy, the state pays to get these people an education or training to actually make their value high enough they are hireable at a living wage.
@freemo @rootfake @MikeDunnAuthor Okay if you just increase the minimum salary and do nothing else, obviously that will lead to companies to not hire "less productive" people. But minimum salary by definition is just enough to sustain yourself. Just removing it won't help either. As you said, either people should be supported by the state to get "more productive" or maybe companies shouldn't profit outrageously from workers.
@aiono @rootfake @MikeDunnAuthor
Absolutely, the underlying problem of having low-skill individuals whose skills are not marketable to sustain a living wage is a real problem. We know minimum wage makes this problem worse, so we can of course easily argue to abolish it, but while that wont make the problem worse, it also wont fix it.
As I stated elsewhere to truly address the problem then abolishing minimum wage is only the first step. The next step is to ensure people have access to high quality welfare programs that 1) keep them fed and healthy in the interim, and 2) provide good training programs to ensure their skill sets are marketable so they can make a living wage.
You cant start fixing a problem until you stop doing the things that contribute to the problem, so we cant really fix the problem until we take the minimal first step of abolishing minimum wage, though I absolutely support the fact that it isnt the only step that needs to be taken.
@freemo @aiono @MikeDunnAuthor
okay, so first off, the protestant work ethic is a very specific thing, which both has nothing to do with actual work ethic, and is, at least seemingly anyway, the exact ideology you're espousing. It grew out of the "if you don't work, you don't eat" shit that the early Virginia colonists believed, and is largely why many Americans believe "you'll get ahead through hard work" even though that is *demonstrably false*.
@freemo @aiono @MikeDunnAuthor
Secondly, do you recognize that *someone* still needs to do min wage jobs, and that those people deserve to not be living in squalor? Cause you can't have everyone upskill, there are only so many positions available. Like, if everyone becomes a coder, or a plumber, or an engineer, guess what, those stop being "high skill jobs" (which is a BS term btw, min wage jobs require skills too), and unless we automate them all away, min wage jobs still need doing.
I never claimed minimum wage jobs dont need to be done. No one is claiming those jobs should be abolished. The problem is when you have far too many low-skilled people then the laws of supply and demand dictate low-wage, everyone wants to to do it. When you have high skilled people most of them wont want to do low-skilled work, so the demand for doing the work goes down, and thus the pay goes up.
No one is suggesting **everyone** needs to be "upskill", only the people who are capable of it until you drive the wages up enough to not need to "upskill" people further.
No one is suggesting all people need to be coders and plumbers and engineers, just that more people need to be.
> didn't mean you believed in that part, you obviously didn't
Then its not the exact thing im espousing is it?
> the modern iteration is about believing, effectively, that hard work brings good fortune
Yet my stance is, again, the exact opposite of the mentality you keep trying mental gymnastics to fit me into.
Low-skilled workers are the hardest workers there are, they get paid very little, work huge number of hours, and usually do very hard work. You really think I'm claiming a mathematician, or an engineer is a harder worker than someone who cleans hotel rooms? Nothing I ever said had **anything** to do with hard work and in fact my stance, when considered with common sense, is the obvious, that people shoulder **not** work as hard as they do, they should work smarter (education) not harder. What matters is the value of your skill, not how much energy you put into your job.
You are trying so desperately to fit me into a mold so you can apply your same talking points you are so comfortable using, and its not working. If you want to have a productive conversation your going to have to stop trying to apply the same template you use when arguing this with any generic person and actually start addressing what I've actually said, and recognize my actual standpoint.
@freemo @aiono @MikeDunnAuthor
I didn't mean you believed in that part, you obviously didn't, It's why I specifically said it *grew out of it*. the modern iteration is about believing, effectively, that hard work brings good fortune, and focusing a person's worth on their employment, it's a pretty common thread throughout most American views on employment. It also tends to come with the whole "people who don't do {job i think is valuable} should have less to motivate them to work harder."