Tim Pool (and the rest of the IDW) on Minimum Wage

Tim Pool, in a current and in previous videos, parrots the propaganda of billionaires who aren't in business to make friends and aren't planning to get rich by fairly sharing the profits with those who produce them, their workers and employees on the minimum wage. Whether or not minnimum wage causes temporary job loss and failure of undercapitalized small businesses is ultimately irrelevant, we can't have a Dickensian sweatshop, slave wage, starvation wage, poverty wage economy and society. We've already had that before minimum wage was first implemented in the Great Depression and that's just what it was. MW is one of the features of the New Deal that made "capitalism with a human face" and a great post WW II boom that all Americans could, for the first time, share in, it's one of the few things that stand between us and Upton Sinclair's "jungle".

 Implementing a minimum wage law, with such things as widespread unionization of the workforce and laws friendly to that, is one of the policies that brought a fairer share of the profits to the people who produce them, the workers, and thus brought the great blue collar middle class in our society after the Great Depression. If the minimum wage had kept pace with the cost of living since 1969 it would, in fact, be well above $25 per hour now - similar to what a McDonald's worker starts at in Denmark.

There's always a period of adjustment in which undercapitalized businesses go under right after minimum wage is increased but that rights itself soon and because the "job creators" are the CONSUMERS, not billionaires or business owners, as they self flatteringly designate themselves, the greater availability of disposable, discretionary money to members of the public, particularly those who are most likely to spend it quickly, better situated businesses soon rise up and expand and the economy adjusts with a significant net gain. This is why studies of local economies after a minimum wage increase show mixed results. Inotially, a period of adjustment has some businesses closing but then, after the economy adjusts, there's an expansion in the economy.

Critics of a capitalist society cite a major, systemic reason for income inequality and the presence of poverty amid plenty and the moral outrageousness of the phenomenon of the "working poor" and that is the lack of political economic bargaining power of workers, those who do the work to produce profits, resulting on their getting far less than their fair share of the profits. The business model of slavery and feudalism is the same as that of capitalism only dressed in different clothing, in Marxist theory it's called "The Theory of the Surplus Value of Labor". That is, to maximize profits, pay your workers (or feed your slaves) as little as you can get away with compensating them, preferably just enough for them to be able to survive until the next day (and to reproduce themselves, raise offspring and produce more workers for you) and work for you some more and produce more profits for you (If it it sounds like the principles of patrimony or the domestication of animals being applied to human beings it's because it is. As Marxist and other critiques of capitalism point out, in human political economic evolution, private property and different forms of slavery, patriarchy, class hierarchy or most ANY political or economic hierarchy in human society began with the domestication of plants and animals and were, in fact, the result of the principle of domestication being applied to other people as well as to plants and animals.). That was also the model for feudalism in which a feudal Lord would always try to oppress wealthier peasants or peasants with more productive land so he can take from them more of their yield, more of the "fruit of their labor", than from peasants with lower producing land, and leave them with only what they needed to barely survive and, of course, that is the explicit model for frank, unadorned slavery. In capitalism, the yield of production that is in addition to the bare minimum left to the workers, as to the slaves and agrarian peasants in other systems, is given a prettier name, they're called "profits".

There can be no ethics in business in a competitive, capitalist society. Ethics are an impediment to competitiveness. Thus the free market left to its own device will always maximize poverty, homelessness, environmental degradation, workplace hazards, consumer hazards, etc. in a race to the bottom for ethical standards in competition for maximization of profits for which ethical considerations are an impediment to. In a competitive, capitalist society ethics must be handed down by government in the form of laws and regulations thus minnimumum wage laws, that affect all businesses equally and don't affect the competitiveness of any one or segment of them, are, like other regulations, necessary to ensure the rights of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and perhaps some others of relatively powerless people are not trampled on because the free market will NOT ensure them or only occasionally and to a very limited degree when it happens to put money in the pocket of an affected business owner by dealing with a PR problem from breeches of ethics - and then it's usually effected by presenting a false appearance of ethical practice by the affected business rather than actual ethical practice as that would be the more profitable way for them than to practice actual ethics.

So, like other laws and regulations, minnimum wage laws are essential to prevent a capitalist society from devolving into its entropic state of "dog eat dog", most literal predation, slavery and abuse of segments of the population and ultimately the great mass of people. In the initial, corrective period of a minimum wage increase some undercapitalized enterprises may contract or be eliminated but eventually, because of the increased buying power of workers, the far greater mass of the population, the economy rebounds and is the better for it. People aren't served by poverty wage jobs, of oligarchs, who fund the proliferation of the willfully disingenuous anti minimum wage propaganda so prevalent on their propped up outlets of the Intellectual Dark Web, are. Perhaps a reason numbers jobs are initially reduced in a local economy after the minimum wage is increased there is because people the NEED to work fewer jobs to get by.