Why do the rich steal from the poor?

During recent LinkedIn discussion re the minimum wage, it has become apparent that a tremendous percentage of businesspeople believe that human beings should not be assured of a living wage for their labor.

Every kind of irrational, ghoulish argument is thrown about to defend this absurd position against the decent treatment of human beings — suggesting that perhaps sociopathy has reached pandemic proportions, especially amongst those of a certain ethnicity and class.

However, in the vain hope that even the most virulent objectivist can still be reached through reason, I would like to offer the following rational, empirically based argument against the inhumanity of starving fellow human beings who work as hard as anyone, are as productive as anyone, and as worthy of a decent life as anyone.

Failure to raise the minimum wage is theft. More specifically, it is theft by the rich and powerful against the poor and disenfranchised in the service of class greed — simply because they can.

Purloined Productivity

Many people argue in favor of the minimum wage based on need. The cost of living has gone up, they plead, so we need to pay people more. Otherwise they cannot afford rent, utilities, food, a vehicle, etc. Nor can they scrape together the savings necessary to obtain that which is required to escape economic precarity.

At such arguments the white bourgeois ghouls among us scoff. “It’s not my problem that these weaklings aren’t keeping up,” they squawk. “Let them do better to earn more.”

But they are doing better. Much better.

Consider the chart above, prepared by the very wonderful Gabriel Zucman, revealing the relationship between the minimum wage and productivity. The chart shows that the minimum wage has not only plummeted relative to the cost of living. It has also plummeted relative to productivity.

Why does this matter? Well, do the math and use what remains of your brain — given that your heart has shriveled into a clotted little knot.

The convenience store cashier you belittle (but at whom you nonetheless become enraged in your childish entitlement when they do not perform to your lofty expectations) once checked out goods with a gross profit margin of $45 every hour. So if you paid that person $9 per hour, you were extracting a 5x multiple from their labor.

Today, that same cashier is checking out $90 worth of gross margin on goods sold. Without a corresponding increase in pay, you now extract a 10x multiple from their labor.

You are, in other words, a thief.

Of course, you don’t think yourself a thief, because there are no laws on the books addressing your theft. And you can hide behind every capitalist fairy tale and objectivist fabrication at your disposal. But you’re a thief. Worse yet, you’re a thief who steals simply because you can. You have the power to take, so you take.

The Myth of Moral Hazard

The funniest not funniest thing about this situation is that those who argue against raising the minimum wage to something at least barely livable often believe that can do so from what we call “moral hazard.” The moral hazard argument goes something like this:

“If we pay people at the bottom of the economic ladder more, they will have no incentive to behave as we who worship the Almighty Dollar would have them behave.

We must therefore incentivize them to ‘better themselves’ by causing them sufficient pain to induce them to make whatever changes in their lives that we in our wisdom deem salubrious.”

Such reasoning is, of course, fallacious. In fact, just the opposite is true. Raising the minimum wage does not entail moral hazard because you — you who argue against the laborer getting their just deserts, who exercise the power of aggregated capital to oppress the poor, who insanely conflate wealth with merit — you are the moral hazard.

Your immorality is not a felony, though. So you can still believe yourself to be morally superior to the felon rotting in prison. But it is actually you who should rot in prison. Wage theft outstrips all other crime in its scale and pervasiveness. Yet no one is incarcerate for it.

Although, from what I have seen, you already are in a prison. It is a prison of your own making. And you are likely to spend your entire life in it.

Many of you even have the audacity to call yourselves “Christians.” But you know nothing of our precious Christ. He loved the poor and shamed the rich. He told us to give — and when the giving became painful to give some more. You call yourselves “patriots” while you militate against your fellow Americans. You cry about a paltry tax bill when you already have a million gotdam dollars in the bank — and then you complain when your minimum-wage supply chain doesn’t deliver that comfy new pillow in time.

But that pillow won’t help you sleep. Nothing will help you sleep.

You are thieves, scoundrels, antichrists, and seditionists. Your position is not merely some opposing opinion to my own. It is scandal. It is loathsome. It is the manifestation of a festering disease that will kill both you and the poor you oppress in the same plague. And that plague will not be a biological one that accidentally originates in some Asian wet market.

It is a plague that you have concocted yourself with your own thieving greed.

contact the author at www.lennyliebmann.com