Fast-Food Strikes Expand Across U.S. to 50 Cities

[Flatulo]

210. Where to begin...

My thoughts and philosophy on this issue of wealth distribution are complicated, but I'll try to explain them. I hope this doesn't come across as lecturing - it's just my little worldview.

First off, I believe that money has a real intrinsic value, and that value can be measured in terms of what it can be exchanged for without using coercion or theft or other forms of gaming the system. The currency itself is just a symbol of that value.

When corporate leadership started arbitrarily declaring that their worth was 2X, 10X, 20X and more than what it was previously, more or less overnight, and without adding any actual value to our economy, bad things happened, things that have had macro-economic effects. The job of corporate leadership turned from creation of tangible goods to destruction of the means to create them. They did this by wrecking great companies that had been built by brilliant engineer/entrepreneurs, selling off the pieces to Chinese interests and taking the proceeds for themselves. Our elected officials did nothing to stop this, and in fact looked the other way while corporate governance became outright theft.

The kinds of things that make a country wealthy are not hamburgers - they are machine tools, agricultural products (including food), computers, airframes, heavy equipment, and consumer items that you can sell to your trading partners. So the kinds of things that most minimum wage workers are creating - namely cheap meals, do nothing to add to our collective wealth. It's like Ross Perot said back in 198o - you can't have an economy when we're all just giving each other haircuts.

So in some ways, I think that just doubling the wages of the service sector without adding any real value to the economy, will just be an inflationary measure. In a few years, the new wages will have no more purchasing power than the current wage.

Secondly, I'm not sure that we want to make it so easy to survive on fast-food wages. I think people should be motivated to become engineers and scientists and plumbers and electricians and carpenters. If everyone can pay their rent, have a decent car, have high-speed Internet and a smartphone and data plan and a 42" TV with 500 hi-def channels, why would anyone bust their ass to acquire more wealth? Do we want to tell people that fast food is a good and sound career choice?

I'm thinking more long term. China is graduating 4,000,000 engineers each year to our 90,000. At this rate, how long will it be before we are their third world labor force?

I worked at McD's when I was 16, and I said Fuck This Shit and went and busted my ass and got a degree in mechanical engineering. If I was able to live comfortably on those wages, maybe I wouldn't have been motivated to improve my lot. (Before anyone jumps down my throat, I know that one cannot pay for college with anything less than a trust fund, so times have changed - that's part of what I meant when I said that the social compact had been broken).

Now before everyone misreads what I've written, let me make it very clear that I fully support the right of anyone to strike for higher wages. If workers can hurt the fast food franchises enough, then they will have to cough up more money, and that would be proof that the work they do has more value than they're being currently compensated at. Frankly, I don't think the work is worth $15, especially when college grads are struggling to find work at $10 per hour. Several posters have scolded me with 'well, this is about the fast food workers, not everyone else', but that smacks of 'fuck-you-I've-got-mine-ism'.

I've tried to answer you as honestly and I can. My attitude is decidedly libertarian as regards wages, which is a philosophy I ascribed to for most of my life. But in the last decade or so I've observed corporate theft on a breathtaking scale and have committed to returning to higher tax rates and more redistribution to correct this unstable, out of control system we've become. We're headed off a cliff if we don't turn things around in some way.

Maybe I'm all wet and raising the minimum wage to $15 won't have any appreciable effect. I honestly don't know how many people at the minimum wage are primary wage earners, but I'm sure it's a lot more than when I was a kid, and the only people in these jobs were pimply faced kids working for gas money.

I don't have any skin in this game, as I don't eat any fast food at all, but even if I did, I wouldn't cross any picket lines. People do have the right to fight for more. Especially since the guys at the top have simply stolen it.