Wages are a price like anything else. And prices are not determined by fiat, but by supply and demand.. this means that while an employer and employee have a degree of negotiating space respecting the margins of a wage, they are defined in their broad parameters by the market… which is all products and all wage earners competing for wages. Bezos is lobbying for a federal minimum wage right now because he knows what that will do to capital poor completion. It will knock them out. Unfortunately, a minimum wage which does not reflect the actual productivity and hence market value of the employee, bids him out of the employment market as well. This becomes a major cause of unemployment… just as other price fixing schemes in other areas (rent control etc) cause scarcity in those areas, so price fixing of wages causes scarcity of employment. Minimum wage jobs are not meant to be self supporting. They are entry level, which means you acquire through them the necessary skills to move up the ladder which the vast majority of peeps do as for ‘living wages’. Wages do not drop out of trees whole. If they did, perhaps we could refer to one’s ‘right’ to such a thing. Instead, wages are offered by a producer who produces it by some effort. Any thing produced by the effort of one person is not the rightful property of another. The other has no moral or legal claim on it. He cannot command his wishes and wants into existence to the extent they are dependent on another’s work. He can persuade, negotiate and /or earn something and by that effort (along with the consent of the other stake a claim. But at no time is it the de facto state of one person to satisfy another. If it is, we are not free. lastly, and this is the final thing. I think a quarter of the budget is defense. The VAST majority of spending is on entitlements… ie wealth transfers.
@MarkRPellegrino
