[nullc]

Have you ever lived in poverty? Have you ever earned minimum wage (or below)? I have and I am extremely grateful for the oppturnities it brought me and the life I was eventually able to make out of it.

There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!

[toomuchtodo]

Yes and yes. It is why I believe there is no room for negotiation and weaseling out of paying humans a wage required that enables them to live with dignity (as it relates to a minimum wage) [1].

Edit:

> There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!

I don't know what else to tell you my dude. McDonalds made $14B in profit last year. I can show you many examples where the economic resources surely exist based on the profits being made, in whatever industry or vertical you want to pick from, to pay people a living wage. I'm not saying no profits, I'm not cheering on communism. I'm simply arguing for the existing system to pay people enough to survive in comfort, regardless of age, with some combination of decreased profits and increased costs. If I can show you the economic value and wealth exists, and we still go through contortions to argue we cannot pay living wages to people (when the evidence is robust that we can), I can either come to the conclusion that someone has not built a robust mental model on all of the variables in play or they just don't think we should pay people enough to live. We're just arguing unnecessary economic system complexity (living wages for some, lower wages for teenagers even though a majority of minimum wage workers are not teenagers [2]) to paper over exploitation for some combination of consumer excess and shareholder returns. No attempt at dehumanizing is being made.

[1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840936

[nullc]

As a worker being denied the ability to get work I wanted to accept at an agreed wage because someone far away who never met me and doesn't understand my life thought it was too low for my own good isn't particularly dignified.

That's why I'm arguing with your presentation even though I don't oppose having a minimum wage. It's not just a question of lacking empathy for someone or living with dignity, because in those terms a minimum wage can have the opposite effect.

And dismissing contrasting views as unemphatic or suggesting that no one can be poorly paid with dignity detracts from having a useful conversation... it also says little about what the minimum wage should be. Certainly $1m/yr is more dignified than less! :P