>>1750962
>Second Paragraph
The issue that bringing in more workers at home and hiring more abroad creates. The three principle categories of worker are blue collar, white collar, and illegal/substandard. You can increase the total number of workers at home sustainably when the economy is expanding to accomodate them and there is a slave caste to lift the expected standard of living, which in present America's case is illegal/substandard workers both internally and abroad. Blue collar (this includes engineers, technicians, etc, generally anyone with a post-secondary education resulting in a degree) and some white collar (including teachers and other public servants, again anyone with a post-secondary education resulting in a degree, which I alluded to as being an issue in the first paragraph) workers are unionized, and the former, blue collar, has set the precedents that the latter, white collar, expect in workplace management and labor compensation, ergo wage. This undermines the dollar's purchasing power by increasing liquidity. Suddenly the minimum wage is only something that people just starting to work, part-time workers, pensioners, and migrants (substandard workers) get. However, these union practices have led to draconian rules around industry that prevent modernization, as explained in the third paragraph. As time has passed and the United States has transitioned to a service economy, dependence on an external slave caste of substandard workers (relative to those in the United States) has increased. However, the world is developing and increasing the real or expected standard of living for everyone, including this external slave caste, something actually pushed by the morality of Americans (eg. backlash against sweatshops), but that's also its own issue. Since the world is developing, the practice of having a human slave caste is becoming harder to sustain, but because of the huge amount of human biomass accrued through the practices which have created this situation, abandoning human manufacturing wholesale would be inhumane. This returns to the degree holding issue. Since everyone has a degree, they need to be able to do something with it. That's what an expanding economy would provide. Instead, many degree-holders are left with nothing to look forward to which would make up the time and financial cost of attending university. Since the average degree holder knows about unions and has an unrealistic idea of them as a push for greater compensation for labor as an action, they will expect to be able to join a union or unionize. And when the economy is mostly made of degree-holders, an interior slave caste can only be maintained through the export of labor (the exterior slave caste) or the import of workers. While you could theoretically make a nation of highly educated people down to even the homeless, methods other than infinite resource application to the individual are considered too inhumane at this point. This leads to a situation where the value of labor as an action, which is what must be argued in an environment where a minimum wage exists, is held higher by the American population than it is by foreigners, even if it's becoming more valued by foreigners over time. Thus, jobs that are more than just immediate physical services can be exported to the slave caste.
>Third Paragraph
Entrenched unions incentivize the export of labor through the promotion and maintenance of regulations which no longer apply to the modern workplace. This is contributory to the focus of this paragraph: traditional infrastructure. This is what the elevator example is about. Construction of anything in America is long and arduous because of draconian laws and unrealistic expectations partially due to the ideas of labor as time as value and the economy as a national body. For example, all new elevators must be able to fit seven foot stretches comfortably with two attendants. This is insane anywhere else in the world. It is one of the biggest limiters to creating new high rise infrastructure, but there are just piles of other reasons as to why elevators, specifically elevators, prevent high rise infrastructure in America. Traditional infrastructure is why elevators have to be made by such impossible rules and companies over a certain size face discrimination lawsuits if they employ over a certain number of people and don't make up positions for useless eaters. Whole communities and cultures form around the most basic, useless jobs and lifestyles because of this, and this traditional infrastructure is maintained because it presereves continuity with material conditions which have now become entirely different from those of the past. With current technology, it would be possible to automate almost every job every American holds. However, labor is required to automate or replace labor. This is why many people train their replacements. To overtly work toward the complete automation of labor would create intense civil conflict becuase it would suddenly invalidate the livelihoods of almost every American because America has an excess population which cannot be completely transferred to new labor or easily phased out of the workforce. In the past, excess population was culled by war or spread by imperialism and colonialism. Without war, the number of viable, humane solutions left is decreasing. This is why certain groups (eg. the WEF) posit depopulation as a necessity. Without the intake of new resources from space, infinite human population growth is unsustainable in the long term. The current model, which also encourages the development of the slave caste as mentioned in paragraph 2, creates increasing prices for goods. The production value of everything involved in, for example, an iPhone is higher than its sold value, but the sold value can be spread and adjusted across populations. Now that it's becoming more difficult to depress the production value compared to complete production in America, the price increases for everyone. This is because, as stated, the cost of an iPhone has to cover everything at Apple, even things that aren't related to the iPhone, as well as every company Apple employs. I mentioned things like generational trauma and outdated monopoly and labor laws as examples of traditional infrastructure but should have been clearer. Again, part of what the cost here has to cover is minimum wage, but this time across every country involved.
>Fourth Paragraph
Increasing the minimum wage without changing the mechanisms around the minimum wage and overhauling the economy would be a disaster for the dollar's purchasing power. If you were to raise the minimum wage from $7 to $20, what many living wage advocates call for, it's not as if: liquidity would suddenly increase, Americans would have a dumpster economy which is also a slave to the dollar like Eastern Europe is to Western Europe for the Euro, the population would decrease or its increase would retard, it would be come any faster or more efficient to generate capital through physical development like resource extraction and refinement and construction, companies would want to bring factories back and let a blue collar middle class be resurrected to wedge out substandard labor, or the rest of the world wouldn't raise the prices of its products and services or would increase minimum wage too. America has become generationally adjusted to its current minimum wage and the machinery surrounding it. To explain the example I used here: black people and women typically get jobs that were created in response to anti-discrimination laws, but many of these jobs aren't especially well-paid. However, black people and women, especially black women, live in entirely different material conditions than the majority of the population. The reasons for this are part of the issues with the popularization of degrees, especially when it comes to degrees for black women. Anyway, the average degree-holder who does do work which his degree calls for makes about $20/hour. He would still make $20/hr if minimum wage increased, since that's how much his industry and adjacent industries have become used to paying. The black woman in this example implicitly gets government assistance and continue to live her life with that assistance in potentially a better situation than she did before. The average degree holder gets a metaphorical bullet through the head. It's not as if everything which holds his lifestyle together will suddenly increase in amount or frequency to let others enjoy it too or let him enjoy more of it. He's suddenly impoverished and has to live on minimum wage. The average living wage advocate's answer to this issue is price controls, which creates disasters in societies such as America's (those with heavy internal diversity and international competition without dumping ground economies).
>Fifth Paragraph
Wilson and Hoover were two American presidents. Both acted on the idea of "prevailing wage," the concept of wages being standard within labor markets. If seven people make $7, and three people make $3, the prevailing wage is $7, so the three people who make $3 should now make $7. However, if one person was to make $10, who he works for now has reason to pay him $7, outside of government intervention to prevent wage decrease based on prevailing wage, which naturally creates a minimum wage. FDR and his lot took this a step further. Since time is money, and almost all basic labor can be done in an industrial society based around physical production (unskilled labor), and all of these people must live in about the same material conditions and with similar lifestyles, then it's inhumane to have the amount of money they make be based on the demands of the market through a "prevailing wage" which the government doesn't control. Instead, they should have a minimum wage, since all of their labor basically blends together, and they even act on that through unions. This is their reasoning, at least. The thing is, minimum wage is a blatant violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, if not also the First Amendment. The Supreme Court killed FDR's National Recovery Administration (NRA) in 1935 (which also enacted price controls in addition to pushing minimum wage) via the same means it would destroy discrimination, the Commerce Clause. FDR and Congress hated this and passed a new law which basically rebuilt the NRA within the American government by empowering unions before the end of the year. This law, the Wagner Act, got off scott-free because FDR intimidated the Supreme Court by threatening to pack it. This legitimized partisan judging, something believed to have been on life support since Reconstruction, but that is another issue. I don't actually mind what FDR did. If anything, I blame the court even if I don't like FDR. FDR was a cutthroat who willingly dragged the US into war with Japan to further his economic scheme for American dominance which would work beside the Soviet Union as a check to the French and British. He was relentless in his pursuit of a global American hegemony. However, America hasn't seriously followed through on FDR's precedent. It has brought itself to heel and grown comfortable. Instead of valuing the future and taking revolutionary action, industrial and political forces in America blend together and leave each other alone until one side or the other attempts such a thing. When the political side tries to change anything, like breaking up companies, feet are dragged until a better political climate arrives to say that there will be no change. When the industrial side tries to change anything, it must become involved in politics and eventually makes a deal and is assimilated, like Musk, or killed by petty political squabbles, like AI development and nuclear power proliferation.