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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

MacDonald's is also a multibillion dollar corp., nobody in their right mind thinks they can raise a family working at MacD's without additional income or subsidy.

It's a job for teenagers to get experience and for blue collar retirees to make some money to and to their SS checks.

People should stop thinking teenager jobs sustain families. It doesn't have the value add. If you want to make a living open up a stand and maybe if you do things well, you'll survive and thrive.

Even in developing economies, this is ceasing to be the case. Never mind mature economies.

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The minimum wage was always supposed to be a living wage, not a pittance for teens and retirees. To quote FDR's statement when signing the law which instituted the first federal minimum wage.

> In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html

Well, we have a problem, then. Currently the whole of commerce and the whole of industry consider it a moral imperative to pay less than a living wage to workers, because that's how the value proposition shakes out when you include all possible sources of labor local and global, and include the option to automate away the labor entirely.

It's considered a moral imperative to seek the lowest cost and highest efficiency. Far from being 'not allowed to continue', any business that can legitimately arbitrage its labor so that it's paying less or substantially less than a living wage for equivalent labor, is celebrated and encouraged with the full force of societal capital. No other consideration is allowed to happen.

FDR's thinking absolutely doesn't apply anymore. Maybe it should, or maybe this just reveals the fact that our economic system is now orthoganal to human survival as a species.

> The minimum wage was always supposed to be a living wage

Well, that and a way to keep dangerous newcomers and minorities from driving down wages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Bacon_Act_of_193...

"The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him." - E.A. Ross

>If you want to make a living open up a stand and maybe if you do things well, you'll survive and thrive.

And if you don't survive and thrive? Then what?

Luckily, capitalism has a solution to that: https://media.giphy.com/media/Qa5dsjQjlCqOY/giphy.gif

I don't understand, what point are you making? Your solution is pull yourself up by your bootstraps?

"have the poor considered making more money?"

No, but you cannot in good conscience believe that you can raise a middle class family if that's your one skill.

We also have people complaining about vanishing steel jobs, listen, they're not coming back and you are going to have to adjust.

Have you considered there is no possible skill that will establish a societal middle class for the population, no matter what effort or resources are put behind it?

In less than ten years you'll be talking about vanishing coding jobs, and the word is they're not coming back. What then? There is nothing we can't optimize to require less human labor. There is no possible skill that will translate to 'humans as a class' remaining relevant to productivity and a labor pool that's increasingly nonhuman. It's like expecting people to hammer in railroad ties, or dig through rock with pickaxes. Absurd, unreasonable, insane.

I quite agree with 'adjust', but I'm shocked by the idea that 'acquiring skills' is your notion of the standard to apply to all humans. There is no skill or skills that will do what you think is going to happen. All that will happen is, desperate people will obliterate the labor value of coding and thinking, during the final phase of human-centric thinking as a type of labor.

I can in good conscience believe he shouldn't have to borrow money simply to see a dentist.

I'm not clamoring to say they deserve a nice car or go to Disney world, but surely you can agree that every citizen in this country deserves a basic right to basic health care and education, and the means to achieve them?

Basic message is don't expect much from an entry level job. You can't make a living from them even in developing countries, much less in developed countries.

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