[dragonwriter]

> So while you can live on a McDonalds income, it's only because your fellow citizens are chipping in. Effectively we are subsidising McDonalds as they can now give you a lower income and get away with it.

No, before social support networks of the modern mixed economy companies paid worse for basically unskilled jobs. The surplus of people desperate for work meant that if the pay was better than no job but inadequate for survival in the long term, people would still take it, and if the inadequate pay meant they died or became unable to work, well, there were always more people in the surplus labor pool to replace them.

Decreasing the desperate need for employment puts more power in the hands of labor, not capital.