That's Heavy, Man!

I'm not sure how to respond to all that stuff you said about making a better world, I'll have to think about it for awhile. Meanwhile, I think we should keep going because, if we wait till we can solve that one, we won't get anything else done.

Of course all opinions are not equally valid, but that doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive either. Sometimes the truth is somewhere in the middle, and the only way you're going to find the middle is to bounce back and forth between the extremes until gravity or something takes over and settles you where you need to be. I usually don't go onto our discussions with an agenda, I just toss something out and see where it lands. Maybe some things won't ever land, but we'll never know if we don't toss them around a bit.

When we first started working, minimum wage wasn't that big a deal, it was just a starting point for youngsters working their first job. Then, when you got some experience under your belt, you could start looking around for something better. If there were no opportunities for advancement with your current employer, you just found yourself another employer. I don't think it's like that nowadays. With the de-industrialization of America, a lot of people are working at low paying service jobs, and there's more people looking for work than there is work. Wages in general have not kept pace with inflation since about the 1970s, and the average family needs two people working to make the  money that one person used to make.

Another feature of the post industrial age is that we have an economy based on consumption rather than production. According to several news reports I have heard, consumer spending accounts for about 70% of all the economic activity in the country. Now I never asked for this situation, but it's here now, and we have to deal with it somehow. If you're going to base your economy on consumer spending, it seems that you've got to find some way to get money into the hands of the consumers. You can either raise their wages, or you can give them supplementary assistance like food stamps and Medicaid. I don't buy the assertion that raising wages causes employers to hire less people, they just raise the price of their product to make up the difference. If they raise prices too high, then people  buy less stuff, and we're right back where we started from. Supplementary assistance comes out of our pocket too, either as increased taxes or inflation. The more money we lose to taxes and inflation, the less money we have to buy stuff and, again, we're right back where we started from.

It was some time in the 1980s that I first heard about this post industrial movement. I told them at the time that it wouldn't work, but they didn't listen to me. They never do.