There’s a much better way of keeping the bank well fed. (Unsplash/Public Domain)

For over a hundred years now, promoting a living wage for the most vulnerable, exploited workers has been a staple of progressive thought, discussion and policy. Existing within the context of a capitalist society, providing a living wage rate is seen to varying degrees as the best way to lift people out of poverty and into a more prosperous life state. Unfortunately, and ironically, raising the minimum wage merely places a band-aid on what is a fundamentally exploitative, paternalistic, and inhumane economic system. This strategy also fails to consider the potential positive impact of alternative economic systems, presupposing, incorrectly, that capitalism will somehow solve its own problems.

The most significant problems with the minimum wage are the underlying assumptions that accompany such a policy. From John Calvin to John D Rockefeller, the western world has convinced itself that work is a moral obligation in addition to being an economic necessity. What started as “Idleness is the enemy of the soul” a la Saint Benedict became the Calvinists concept of the so-called “Protestant Work Ethic”, where the moral person was engaged in labor from dawn until dusk, and that said labor made a person righteous in the eyes of God and the community. And it has not stopped there. How often does one hear the refrain of the capitalist class that “the poor deserve to be poor” or “if they would only work harder, then they wouldn’t be poor?” In essence, you only have a right or reason to exist if you are engaged in work; otherwise, you are disposable at best and a societal burden at worst. And even if you do work, there is a real possibility that your earned wage will not cover your basic living expenses — the phenomenon we have dubbed the “working poor”. This historical state is one that deserves, frankly, to end, and not be further entrenched. As a university professor recently scolded a roomful of billionaires at the Davos Conference, “Poverty isn’t a lack of morals; it’s a lack of cash.”

Another fundamental problem with the minimum wage that my fellow liberals fail to realize is that it serves to further entrench the justification-by-labor economy that currently exists and fails to alter the relationship between the survival (never mind well-being and growth) of an individual and the need to earn some kind of wage in order to do so. It doesn’t matter if a person is making $5, $15, or even $20 an hour; they still need to work for that wage to access the most basic necessities in life — food, shelter, clothing, and the like. So in reality, how we justify and support our existence hasn’t changed fundamentally since humanity was overwhelmingly engaged in subsistence agriculture. Like the wage system now, choosing not to participate in said system is a prescription for financial ruin at best and ultimately death. Thus, rather than somehow save us from a subsistence lifestyle, capitalism and urbanization merely traded one version of it (agriculture) for another (labor). Other proposed solutions like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s “job guarantee” fall victim to the same essential problem of not altering this basic reality.

Taking the analogy further, we can see how such a situation is disadvantageous for the business community as well, and how that disadvantage is skewed against smaller businesses. Increases in minimum wages are much easier to bear for larger companies than it is for smaller companies and start-ups. The belief that small business owners can easily absorb the increased labor costs, which in the case of most small businesses, isn’t supported by the simple math. It was easy for Amazon and Wal-Mart to raise their lowest wages to $15/hr, but the local ice cream shop may seriously struggle to do the same thing. And finally, raising the wage, as alluded to above, does nothing to fundamentally alter the relationship between employer and employee from, by analogy, the relationship of a feudal lord to a peasant. The lord/employer trades protection or wages for labor, and noncompliance would all but guarantee destitution. As in times past, we still do not have a fundamental right to food, shelter and clothing if we do not work.

Ironically, the left has whole-heartedly embraced the idea of separating the ability to access health care from employment, and the idea has finally even taken hold among the greater American public. “No one should go broke because they get sick” and “Health care is a human right” have become refrains among activists and more liberal politicians alike, which makes it all the more disappointing that they do not extend this to wages. The more entrepreneurial-minded have observed that a key reason why people stay in bad jobs is because they do not want to lose their access to health care; at the same time, polling data indicates that the single biggest reason that people do not start up new companies is the lack of a secure, steady income. Even with a system of guaranteed health care a la Medicare-For-All, the biggest impediment to individuals starting their own businesses is still the wage-labor system itself. Fixing health care is, while vital, only a partial solution to this dilemma.

Now I can already hear people on the right saying that “You think no one should have to work at all” and that we want to create some kind of society of moochers. Fortunately, this is nothing more than a straw man attack on our position on two main grounds. First and foremost, some of the most important work that is done in any society largely goes unpaid and uncompensated. All the hours spent taking care of the family and engaging in other essential domestic tasks is vital to the survival of any person or household, yet throughout history, this work is never directly compensated. We often speak of a “motherhood tax”, a hidden tax on women who leave the workforce to have children and thus fall behind their male counterparts economically, while at the same time moralizing against single parents for having to work full time while they raise a family. Furthermore, how much that goes on within a community happens if only for the sweat and labor of individuals who volunteer their time? The fact that essential work at home and in the community that goes forever unpaid exists undermines this first objection.

Second, in this critique is another unstated assumption that stems from the aforementioned moralization of work and idleness; that is, that any work is worth doing. Anyone who has worked in the service sector or middle management is likely familiar with the phenomenon of “bullshit jobs”, which take two general forms. First, the job in which a person works “40–50 hour weeks” but only does about 15 hours of “real work” during that time. I’m reminded of my own stint in retail customer service by that one. The second “bullshit job” is the job that the person who holds it derives no personal fulfillment from at best and, at worst, feels should not even exist. Anthropologist David Graeber observed amusedly that capitalism was supposed to make the existence of “bullshit jobs” impossible. In Strike! Magazine, he writes:

…in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to…But, of course, this is the sort of…problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still…it happens. David Graeber, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

In other words, we cannot rely on economics and capitalism to allay the perpetuation of societal busywork. Graeber and I agree that the real reason for this is largely traditional notions of morality established for the self-serving purposes of the capitalist class:

The feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them. Graeber, ibid.

It’s almost as if John Calvin and Saint Benedict conspired with the robber barons John D. Rockefeller and George Pullman without consulting Milton Friedman to create an economic system that benefited only themselves. The fact that outdated, elitist morality can override basic economic necessities proves that capitalism has not, and will not, fix this problem.

So if raising the wage isn’t a real solution, then what is? Simply put, we need to completely rethink the relationship between work and existence, severing the right to exist from the ability to perform labor for someone other than oneself. This reality is going to be forced upon us sooner than we think with the coming automation and artificial intelligence revolutions that will permanently replace tens of millions of workers (imagine for example nearly every truck driver in America suddenly losing their jobs because self driving trucks are making their jobs obsolete — it’s coming, and soon). This could be economically catastrophic for our capitalist society, but it doesn’t have to be. Unconditional cash grants directly to individual citizens, be it through Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” or Milton Friedman’s “Negative Income Tax”.

None of this is to minimize the gains of the labor and union movement over the past 150 years, which were often paid for in the blood and lives of workers themselves. The excesses and evils of capitalism have been mitigated through hard-won policies like minimum wages, the 40 hour work week, workplace safety standards and anti-harassment laws. But we should not be content with these gains and we must remain vigilant to avoid their erosion. The labor movement can be seen as a continuation of a profound long-term trend in the west: the gradual democratization of political and economic power, from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence to the Fair Labor Standards Act and through more recent successes, such as the increased availability of paid sick and family leave policies. The framers of the Constitution themselves were even aware of such a general trend towards not only the democratization of power and economics, but also the nature of work. In 1780, John Adams wrote:

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams

Even before the Constitution was conceived, some of the framers clearly had in mind the kind of future that we envision with a Universal Basic Income. Adams foresaw a future in which his descendants would ultimately not need so much of what we traditionally have regarded as “work”. Instead, he envisioned a world in which people would have the liberty to follow their own pursuits, be they artistic, philosophical, or whatnot. More recently, John Maynard Keyes imagined a 15-hour work week becoming the norm as technology improved. Clearly, this hasn’t happened, largely because we are still addicted to the idea of “work is good.” We must eliminate this association and take the next major step in creating a more perfect union that truly establishes domestic tranquility and promotes the general welfare of its people. And the way that we do it is through a universal basic income.