Towards Sanity: A Living Minimum Wage

A market, an exchange of goods and services usually for money, is definitely an expression of human social existence. For all the exposure of the greed and excess of market players, markets have to serve society. They cannot otherwise exist. At the point that they exacerbate social ills and create unmanageable inequalities of station, social, economic, and legal, the greed and excess that make markets function effectively have broken the operational constraints of proper market dynamics and are loose, rather like a maniac escapee from a high security mental facility. The general case is, and the legitimate prejudice is, that something in the economy has lost equilibrium and is generating unsustainable numbers which are fueling aberrant economic behavior.
While draconian measures are the usual kneejerk reaction to this social collapse, and it is a social collapse, a measured response calculated to find the cause of the disequilibrium is far more desirable. Transfers of wealth are draconian and polarize society. The argument resolves around the question of the best employment of disposable income. According to the wealthy investment is more valuable to society and according to the poor, the general welfare is paramount to a functioning constitutional democracy. That argument is well beyond the scope of this blog and its resolution requires a fine balance in a society.
It is my contention that an adequate measured response to this social collapse would be an increase in the minimum wage to a level of true economic and social participation which has been found to be the foundation of the wealth and health of a society. The problem with letting the market set the price of labor is that that means that society considers labor a commodity to be traded and that indicates that philosophically society considers human beings a commodity. What kind of society would that be? A society of robots? That position is counter to the values of Western Civilization and well beyond the limits of reason. It is alienated, read insane, and cannot be tolerated in a constitutional democracy. That is the absolute argument for a minimum wage. As for the living minimum wage, it is a commonplace observation that a business paying less than living wages is not really in a value added economy. It is in the business of generating funny numbers that drive market psychology beyond its proper bounds.
While I believe that the mass industrial society that has turned us all into minions of the automated machine process and the consequent loss of self-esteem and the compensatory defensive reaction of grandiose self-concepts to be the root cause of this antisocial phenomenon, the redress to that mindless society currently in process is an entrepreneur/infrastructure model which, while far more conducive to psychological health, does leave far too many people out.
Central to this model is the notion that the bar to social and economic participation is being raised but is still attainable. That is nonsense. The bar is over everybody's head. IBM's Watson and a robot could have the average entrepreneur's lunch. The sooner we close the lid on the Pandora's box of the notion that technology is intrinsically superior to human beings, the better. Technology serves humankind and the boldest, measured, statement we can make to that effect is a living minimum wage.