[cheesecracker]

Very few people can afford to pay other people a living wage. What's your point?

You only exhibit the socialist magic thinking again As if there are infinite resources, and the only problem is to redistribute them. That's not how the real work works. If you want to eat, somebody (possibly you) has to hunt or farm, gather resources, and so on. It's not a given that any number of people can simply earn a "living wage" or even have a job. Somebody has to create such jobs, that are productive enough to feed somebody.

Instead of complain about stinginess of businesses, prove your theories by creating jobs that pay better.

[dwb]

I didn't say anything about resource distribution, I was refuting your idea of "if you don't like the pay then don't take the job". It's a simple fact that this isn't a realistic way of seeing most people's choices.

However, yes, I would agree with previous commenters that if you can't afford to pay people enough to live on then you don't have a business that society should deem viable. If everyone in society was scrabbling around for resources then you might have a point, but in actual fact, the dominant situation is that there is a tiny group of people who are extraordinarily wealthy, a larger-but-still-not-massive group of people who are comfortable, and a great deal of people who get what's left, often not very much at all. Resources are so unfairly distributed I just don't find your argument at all persuasive.

Socialist thought doesn't assume infinite resources, it just says that democracy should be extended much further than it is right now, particularly to the workplace. We could "create" jobs collectively and not leave the decision of how much to pay to a small group of people who have all the power simply because they have the money to start with.

[cheesecracker]

Just because somebody is rich, doesn't imply there are many resources. It's just a debt owed by society, which can also go bankrupt. Jeff Bezos earning another Billion does not imply more houses have been created or more plants have been reared and so on. It just means people bought stuff from him, in return for a promise to pay them back in the future (money is a promise of future goods). If Bezos decided today to buy loads of grain with his Billions, to feed the poor somehwere, that grain would be missing somewhere else.

The talk about "businesses that society should consider viable" is nonsense, as the example of the pensioner wanting someone to clean their apartment shows. What should they do if society doesn't consider them "viable", commit suicide?

If society doesn't deem some business "viable", they can simply refuse to work for that business.

If you want to create jobs "collectively", sorry to say, you are in full blown socialist territory, and you will fail, for the same reasons that socialism always fail (because planning economies can't assign resources efficiently enough).