Founded By Geniuses, Run By Idiots

[Urbane Guerrilla]

But the answer to that is not to take away the in work benefits but to take away the need for them. The current minimum wage is insufficient for a working family to house, clothe and feed themselves. The cost of living in the UK is very high. And a minimum wage of just under £7 an hour does not meet those costs even if both adults in a house are working full time.

We're seeing that this side of the pond too, and you're entirely correct.

Though minimum wage is not intended -- never was -- to be career wage. It's for entry level and for the household member who is NOT the mainstay of the household, the one who really pays the bills.

The point the demagogues saying "the Minimum Wage should and shall be a living wage!" miss is that it literally puts a foundation under the idea of working minimum-wage all your life, adolescence to senescence. That is not advancement -- that's living on the Dole, with a co-pay. Has the disadvantage of no prospect of an end to it. Demagogues of that stripe are famously not philosophers; even worse, their entire working assumption is they will never run out of other people's money, and that's just not true. You can fudge along for quite a while, yes -- then the house of cards falls. The demagogues tell you to concentrate on those who are doing the cheating -- yet some careful thought will conclude that the ones going around cheating are not within the actual nature of capitalism -- which requires care enough of the world's prosperity that anyone may sell any worthy good or service anywhere in it, and thus make a living. People going outside of ethical freemarketing ended up making the socialists of both the Communist and Fascist varieties feel needed.

That's the last thing we want. Socialists aren't necessary at all, and America proves that, in spades. Which drew and draws Socialist attention, and was pretty much the entire casus belli for every war of note -- leaving aside a few small ones that were not -- of the twentieth century from 1921 going forward. We're among the largest of the anti-socialist societies, and all the vehement Socialists therefore treat us as The Enemy, in caps.