[thehappypm]

"anyone who works full time should be able to afford necessities like safe housing and adequate food" sounds great.

A minimum wage is a lot like having your health care tied to your employer. With employer-sponsored health care, employers pay the lion's share of the cost, and workers are left out to dry if they leave their jobs.

Minimum wage is the same concept except for at a grander scale. Your employer provides the lion's share of the resources for your food, housing, transportation, etc.

With health care the liberal agenda is focusing on shifting it away from the employer, so you're not stuck in the rat trap of needing a job to go to the doctor.

Maybe we need a similar thing for other basics.

[OzyM]

As in UBI? That's the only experiment I know of (or at least, politically feasible experiment) trying to decouple physical necessities and employment.

I guess you bring up an interesting point here, that UBI would make minimum wage obsolete.

It seems like you're arguing for changing "anyone who works full time should be able to afford necessities like safe housing and adequate food" to just "anyone should be able to afford necessities like safe housing and adequate food." I'm not opposed on principle, but I think this is a harder goal to hit in practice.

[thehappypm]

Right now, we demand companies that use minimum wage labor to over-pay their workers, as a form of corporate-sponsored welfare. Wouldn't it make more sense for Walmart to pay employees market rate, and the tax base as a whole ensure that nobody goes hungry?

[OzyM]

I think this is such a massive and fundamental restructuring of the US's historical way of doing things (and the popular conception of "how it should be done") that pushing for incremental change like livable minimum wage is probably more effective in the short-run.

In the long run, if UBI continues proving its success in real-life trials and we're able to get a larger share of the population on board, I'd vote in favor of trying it.