"Slave wage"? Wages "fit for a human being"? These are fluff phrases that mean absolutely nothing. The poverty line of the United States (around $11k for an individual this year) is well, well above the median income in the majority of the non-western world. Last year, World Bank economist Branko Milanovic came up with some pretty convincing calculations that indicated that the median global income is around $1200 per year once adjusted for varying costs of living. That goes along with the widely accepted fact that as much as a third of the world's population subsists on $2 a day.
The federal minimum wage in this nation is $7.25 per hour. That equates to roughly $14.5K in a full-time, two thousand hour work year. That means that even at the lowest legal wage in the U.S. you as an individual are beating the poverty line by 25% and the global median by a whopping 1000% plus. I'm sorry, but those figures do not paint a picture of slave labor or inhuman wages. Anyone who says that they do while a third of the world's population scrapes by on less than $2 a day is the worst kind of first-world hypocrite.
No, we do not need higher minimum wages right now. It's even debatable that we really need one at all. However, it is a certainty that what we do not need is yet more regulation on what should be a predominantly self-regulating market. It is our own incessant need to regulate the market without regard to potential consequences that created this situation in the first place. The rising costs of living, the massive currency inflation, the comparative plunge of worker wages are all due to our meddling in an economy so vast and intricate that we barely understand it well enough to participate in it, much less hope to improve it. Even worse, those arguing for a higher minimum wage seem completely blind to the fact that nearly every study on the employment effects of higher minimum wages is inconclusive at best. To say that it will result in more employment is nearly entirely unfounded. It is more likely that it would result in no noticeable employment changes and could potentially (though not certainly) even cost people their jobs. No, more regulation, more arbitrarily burdensome free-pass legislation is not the answer.
The minimum wage will rise slowly over time because we've created a situation in which it has to. When the wage falls beneath what is required to survive on a large scale, there will be an outcry just as we saw before the Congressional proceedings of 2007 that led to the current federal minimum wage. That's how our system works. However, the rise will not and should not ever result in a comparative gain in actual purchasing power. It will always be the minimum that you need to survive in our nation. That's the whole point, and no one is entitled to more than that. It's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, nothing more.
Make no mistake, you can survive on minimum wage. Will it be easy? No. Will you have to make some tough choices? Absolutely. But these things come down to the idea of personal responsibility. If you can't afford to take care of yourself as an individual, don't have kids for goodness' sake. If you can't afford to own something, don't buy it. If you can't eat what you want or do the things you'd like to, make do with what you can. In short, be responsible. Nobody is entitled to a comfortable standard of living; they are only entitled to the minimum ability to live.
If you don't like that, if you find such a life intolerable, stand up and do something about it. No one owes you anything and success isn't going to simply fall in your lap. If you want it, get out there and earn it. And don't even think about telling me about how your socio-economic position or skin color or sexual orientation has handicapped you. There are far, far too many success stories out there for me to buy that. It's an excuse, and a weak one at that. Strive to do better, push forward, make good choices, compete, and win or lose on your own merits instead of instinctively falling back on the idea that you've been so oppressed or downtrodden that you may as well not bother. Until the people in the lower classes of this country stop making excuses and expecting to be bailed out by others there will be no improvement in the balance of the class system. No amount of legislation will change that.
Personal responsibility, folks. Welcome to America.
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