If the wages paid to a person who works full time are insufficient to meet the ordinary expenses of living, American capitalism has failed us. I would rather think that any working person could earn not only enough to pay rent and feed a small family, but also enough to buy a home, meet medical needs and afford college educations.
-Tony Weller in the Salt Lake Tribune letters section
I'm going to take Mr. Weller at his word and assume he honestly means "any working person" is as clear a concept as it sounds.My house has a front yard, two strips of land that lead to the rear of the house, and a backyard that need yard work. The total yard in question when lumped into a square would measure less than seventy feet on a side. Given my experience with lawn maintenance, I'd expect my lawn to need some level of attention once a week. Some weeks would need more work than others given varying levels of rainfall, sunlight, and other factors. Given the small size of the lawn, costs for lawn care consumables (fuel, blades, etc.) would be very modest.
Aside from the effort required to get the lawn up to standards from its current state, the amount of labor to maintain it would be minor. My roommate was able to obliterate widespread overgrowth (some areas up to thigh height) with a weed-eater in less than 30 minutes. Once the rocks, branches, and leaves are clear, the optimal cutting paths would be easy to determine and follow.
So, in recognition of this, I decide the monetary value I place on having a nice yard and not doing the work to keep it that way is $25 a week. I am willing to pay up to $25 to someone to keep my lawn trimmed and clipped. I figure the exertion to do so is not significant and the work is easy. I don't mind doing it but I have better things to do with my time. However, anything more than $25 represents a cost barrier I'm not willing to cross in normal circumstances.
My neighbor has offered to mow my yard regularly for a fee. If he accepts to be paid $25 a week for the use of his labor and tools and he worked on the yard enough such that I decided he worked enough to earn him his weekly pay, he'd generate an income of $1,300 a year from me. Since I'm a nice guy who hates the government, I wouldn't "report" him to the IRS or any other parasitic agency that'll threaten him with fines and jail time for not handing over their cut of his work. He therefore earns, in a free market capitalist economy, $1,300 in addition to whatever else he does.
The man has no family living with him, but if he did, it becomes immediately clear that the salary I pay him is a tiny part of what he'd need to earn in order to provide a safe, healthy life in a modern American city. Federal poverty guidelines for 2003 state that a family of three lives in poverty when their combined income is at or below $15,260. I make just under $30,000 a year and I cope with cash shortages regularly. A family of three attempting to live on half that seems almost impossible.
I don't know what else my neighbor does to earn an income, nor do I ask him. He accepts the work at the price I proposed and doesn't ask for his wage to be increased.
According to people like Mr. Weller, I ought to pay my neighbor more. A lot more. In fact, I'd have to increase my labor costs many times over. I'll use $25,000 a year as a baseline, for I'm familiar with surviving in Austin at that level of income. I'd therefore have to pay my neighbor just over $480 a week to cut my lawn.
There is no way in hell I'd pay anyone $480 a week to cut my lawn. At that price, we've long gone past lawn service. At that price, I wouldn't be able to afford to pay my home loan or my bills. At that price, I wouldn't hire him to do the job. I have a suspicion a great many people would think the same way.
This would result in two things. He and I could just ignore it and continue on with our business relationship. We're both happy with the arrangement and see no reason to change it. The other option is more sinister: one of us could be forced to change our ways.
He could come to me with a gun in his hand, demanding I give him the higher pay. Most people would rightly judge him to be a menacing extortionist who is clearly in the wrong. On the other hand, I might be forced to pay him the higher amount. Unfortunately, since the gun at my back isn't his, most people don't see the same immorality in this situation. In fact, they see a wrong righted, the deserving getting their deserved, a token of economic justice. In the eyes of the living wage camp, they see a righteous act.
Rather than go broke paying for that lawn care service, I decide to do it myself. The value I place on such a service is far below $480 a week. In the mind of the employee, even though he may enjoy the hell out of that coerced deal, he'd know I'd be getting royally screwed. It's the same boast anyone makes when they explain that they think they're paid more than their labor's worth. Those with functioning minds can see some of the consequences of such a policy. For example, "handyman" jobs would vanish or go underground.
Objections that that kind of work wouldn't be subject to the policy are referred to the simple declaration quoted at the top of this page. Introducing exemptions to this fatally weakens the assumption that labor should result in a living, whether it be for a McDonald's or for General Motors.
I oppose both the living wage and the minimum wage. They are attempts to force a higher valuation beyond the willingness of market participants to exchange. The folks who think everyone who works should be able to afford anything beyond what that labor is worth to the employer support the coerced transfer of wealth from one person to another when under other circumstances such a transfer would be denounced as a crime.
I view the quoted statement as a clear example of a free-floating assertion with no coherent basis. Readers are welcome to persuade me otherwise.
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IFor the first time ever I disagree with you. Well, not really. The Austin Tribune reported that it be "Full time work" your analogy doesn't quite fit "full tiem work". Someone could easily trim enough lawns in one week to meet his needs. In fact, it seems to me that nearly anyone can meet their needs reletively inexpensively. I have a wife and two children with a third on the way. Most of my income is, uh, hidden. The lack of paying taxes is helpful, I make under $30,000 a year but only about 25% is taxable income. My wife works part time and brings in between $200 and $500 a month depending on the amount of baby sitting she does. We also don't own things we don't need. Our wardrobes are modest, we cook our own food, we rely on family, the cars we drive we obtain either for free or extremely cheaply, we have a church network that supplies us items for trade and services we need (electrical, plumbing, clothing exchange), when we eat out we use coupons.
Being poor isn't so difficult so long as you don't spend too much money trying to hide that fact.
Posted by: somasoul on March 17, 2005 11:03 AMOf course. I left out the possibility that my neighbor could find a number of similar jobs elsewhere. But that brings up another problem: Say he cuts the lawns of 20 homes on our block at the same price of $25 per lawn. He'll earn $26,000 a year. Given the demands by the minimum wage crowd, that is still not enough. They'd probably want him to enjoy, at the minimum, an income closer to $35,000 a year. Importantly, this assumption doesn't account for local cost-of-living differences, which they'll want to factor in to the final wage.
So...how do you calculate which of his employers are to be forced to pay more? How much more? Do you impose an equal obligation on all 20 households to pay him $34 a week rather than $25, to bring him up to $35,360 a year? What happens if, for whatever reason, the value of his services starts to differ among his customers and they want to variously pay more or less for what they want him to do? Do you assign a percentage increase to each employer according to their portion of his income? All of a sudden, you have the state nosing into intimate details of business relationships, personal wealth, and all that.
Of course, the state does this already. A living wage that satisfied its proponents is likely to expand that intrusion to new areas and greater degrees.
I am not wealthy by my standards. Since I go to college, have a mortgage, pay cable/phone/Internet/utility bills, have a credit card with a large balance, and possess a tendency towards beer snobbery, I have no trivial amount of expenses. To get by, I rely on my friends and family, cheap goods (thanks, Wal-Mart!), and regular choices to save rather than consume.
Perhaps. But you have failed to count the goods you own as part of your wealth. As an anarchist you must be aware that money is owrthless paper, only good possess any real value. The computer you own, the X-Box you have, the food, car..........everything has some monetary value. A financial planner would call these "Personal assets" and their total would be part of your total net worth. (Why the fuck am I talking about this?!?!?!) Anyway, so you are much wealthier than you assume, me thinks. Because you spend your money and have little of it left come the next pay-day you have come to believe that you are reletively poor. Of course you own a home, had you built your own home it may have cost you as little as $30,000. And you own a new car (right? I think I read something about your dad's relationship with your vehicle at some point) which is pricey. Again, the fact that your wallet seems empty has led you to believe that you have a shortage of cash flow. This is the same baloney that government bureaucrats feed us daily, that they need more. They don't, they need to spend less and spend more wisely. I'm not saying this to get on your case, Drizz, I hope it doesn't come across that way. But, you're right, no government bureaucrat should be able to tell me how much I can pay someone to do some work or how much he is allowed to work for or for how long he can do it.
Posted by: somasoul on March 17, 2005 01:23 PMI'm aware of that, yes. The car issue is best digested here ( http://www.drizzten.com/blargchives/001091.html ) but the short of it is: I don't own it, I just operate it with the owner's (my father's) permission. Other manifestations of my wealth include an employer-based retirement account that is probably worth more than $28,000 right now, as well a fridge, stove, clothes washer & dryer, a 62" Toshiba TV (more on that in a future post!), a pile of working computer gear, a massive CD collection, etc. I am not UNwealthy because my assests are significant. I am just not wealthy *by my standards*. :)
I could always build a log cabin and run away from it all...
Posted by: Drizz on March 17, 2005 02:18 PMI agree with Somasoul's first post - the original author was working on an assumption of "full time work". You stated that your room-mate was able to mow the lawn with a weed wacker in a half hour. If we assume "full time work" is 40 hours a week(which is actually short by 5-15 hours depending on where in America you live and work), then he should be able to mow, lets say, 50 lawns in a week. That adds up to only 25 hours of work. So that would allow him 15 minutes PAID break between each lawn (to get to the next lawn, fuel up, and catchhis breath), and a few minutes per hour to spare. 50 lawns at $25.00 per lawn is $1250 per week. Assuming he works 50 weeks in a year, and takes 2 weeks UNPAID vacation per year, that's still $62,000 per year... About one and a half times what I make working 46-50 hours a week as a CAD (computer aided design) Operator at a Printing Plate / Die Shop in West Michigan...
So It all boils down to what you call "full time" and what you consider a "decent wage".
I could always build a log cabin and run away from it all...
Drizz, I think it's frickin' hysterical that you mention this. This week I discovered Skip Ellsworth of Log Home Builders (www.loghomebuilders.org). For the last forty years Skip has taught people how to build their own log home, not cabin, for about $30,000 using basic tools. I have looked extensively into Skip and his company, which seemed a scam, only to read amazing things about him. I plan on taking one of his log home building classes this year.
Posted by: somasoul on March 18, 2005 12:02 PMHey somssoul how did the skip ellsworth log home builder thing turn out? I've been looking into that very thing?
Posted by: saucy-man on March 9, 2006 01:48 PM