Thread by @JuliusGoat

Every argument against raising the minimum wage involves pointing to some other part of our broken system as if it were a beloved cultural treasure to defend rather than just the next unacceptable thing that needs fixing.

“How is it fair to pay people making minimum wage $30k a year when high school teachers start at that?” as if stagnant wages for teachers were an unrelated matter; don’t worry, Bill, we’ll get to it.

Everyone should have the means to survive and thrive and if the current system doesn't provide for that then nuts to the current system; we shouldn't work for it, it should work for us.

This is (pretty obviously to me) the real reason our leaders are so resistant to giving people the relief money needed to combat Covid.

They can't risk exposing the truth that you can actually just give people the money they need and nothing will break.

Our leaders are working to protect a system, but they shouldn't work for the system, they should work for us. The survival and thriving of human beings is the goal. Any part of any system that doesn't work toward that goal can be jettisoned.

Is this obvious, it feels obvious.

"You can't change this malicious part of the system, because this other malicious part of the system will attack us in this other way," well shit-damn, Larry, sounds like the system is the problem, doesn't it.

I think the economy would be better if everyone had more money to spend instead of just funneling the country's entire net worth to like six people who increasingly resemble comic book supervillains.

I'm probably missing something.

Labor is already being replaced by automation anyway, no matter the wage. Keeping wages flat only provides those doing it with time to do so more completely. The root problem are our underlying priorities and the assumptions those priorities drive.

https://twitter.com/DeeepThreat/status/1350810220579184641?s=20

We are still tying human survival and thriving to a requirement to labor for profit when profit has determined to replace human labor.

That's going to lead to genocide. Automation is fine, but not if it exists only to benefit a few.

We have to change our priorities.

Raising the minimum wage—raising all wages—is valuable in that it will raise wages. But it's also the sort of thing that you'd see in a society that has determined that the purpose of society is human thriving, rather than profit. Such a society will do many other fine things.

If raising wages to a livable level means that those who provide wages will simply cut off wages entirely, then we need to either get rid of those who provide wages or we need to get rid of the system that ties human survival and thriving to wage.

Again, this seems obvious.