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by golergka 804 days ago
Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that?

If you raised a minimum wage to that level, you would eliminate a lot of low-level jobs completely, and leave people who don't aspire or need this non-trivial level of achievement without jobs.
1 comments
mschuster91 804 days ago
> Why would you expect a person to be able to afford a family on minimum wage? Why would you even want that?

Society needs children to survive - someone has to pay the pensions after all, at least in common "societal contract" systems, otherwise people will have to literally work until they die.

For that in turn, society needs at least a replacement fertility rate, and usually there is a close negative correlation between wealth and amount of children (i.e. the wealthier people get, the less children they have), so it makes sense to strengthen the ability particularly of the lower classes to have children.

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golergka 804 days ago
> Society needs children to survive

This is true. However, what society definetly doesn't need is

> the ability particularly of the lower classes to have children

That's how you breed poverty and other systemic problems that you later have to deal with. People should only have children when they can afford to invest into real care for them. If a person earns a low wage, he shouldn't be able to afford children because he shouldn't have them.

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mschuster91 804 days ago
> If a person earns a low wage, he shouldn't be able to afford children because he shouldn't have them.

The right to found a family is enshrined in Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights [1] and Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [2].

I agree it's a bit of a stretch, but at least the UDHR definition explicitly states that "the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State"... for me, that clearly implies economic protection, i.e. a society has to make sure that people can actually exercise that right - because how useful is a theoretical right to something (be it to found a family, or to have the right to due process and fair treatment before the courts, or whatever else), when large swaths of the population cannot exercise that right, or have access to it effectively denied by circumstances outside of their but inside the government's control?

[1] https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/convention_ENG

[2] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

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