Another way of looking at minimum wage

[StylesGrant]

 

4. End the minimum wage for plutocrats. Proposals to increase the minimum wage to $15 are understandably popular. But it gets things backward. The reason workers don’t get the full product of their labor now is that the state, controlled by capitalists and landlords, controls the ability of ordinary people to convert their skills and effort into subsistence. All the forms of privilege listed in the sections above amount to toll gates erected between the individual’s skills and effort and the satisfaction of her needs. Because of such toll gates, the privileged classes are able to use artificial property rights and artificial scarcities in land, capital and the use of information to force ordinary people to work extra hard to feed a layer of parasites as a condition of being allowed to feed themselves. All the forms of privilege in the previous three sections are, in effect, a minimum wage for the propertied classes who control the state.

But there are other ways in which government policies artificially increase the amount of labor an individual is required to perform in order to live comfortably. Local health, safety and zoning laws make it difficult or actually criminal for individuals to run micro-enterprises out of their homes (like making, altering or repairing clothing with a sewing machine, running a micro-bakery with an ordinary kitchen oven, having a hair salon in one’s spare room, operating a daycare center for one’s neighbors, providing unlicensed cab services with just a family car and cell phone, etc.).

The effect of such licensing laws is to erect entry barriers that are completely unnecessary from a purely technical perspective, and require massive capital outlays to buy industrial grade equipment and rent stand-alone commercial real estate as a condition of doing business at all. That artificially inflates the debt burden to be serviced, and the minimum revenue stream that must come in every single month to service it and keep from falling deeper in the hole. And the capital outlays, and risk of failure, protect brick-and-mortar businesses from competition by ordinary people with only their own skills to turn into a source of income.

On the other hand, anything that reduces the overhead cost of doing business and the size of the revenue stream required to service it, also in effect reduces the barrier between being “in business” and “out of business.” When a person is able to go into business by taking advantage of the spare capacity of ordinary household capital goods she already owns, operating out of the same housing she was paying for anyway, she can operate with virtually zero extra overhead. All revenue is free and clear, and she can ride out periods of slow business or no business without going in the hole. So it’s possible to incrementally build up a business on the side with no risk at all.

This is doubly true when the basic costs of living are low. But the state also uses its regulatory power to artificially increase the cost of housing, and indeed even of existing at all. Local building codes — written for the most part by building contractors and the skilled trades — criminalize vernacular building techniques, as well as more recent, user-friendly forms of cheap modular construction. According to Ivan Illich, some 30% of housing was still self-built in Massachusetts in the 1940s; but it’s since fallen to almost nothing, despite the development of much more user-friendly building technologies since then. Colin Ward, likewise, recounts the lovingly self-built housing in the British neighborhoods of Laindon and Pittsea in the interwar period — much like today’s favelas in Brazil — that would be illegal today. Aesthetic ordinances prohibit things like growing vegetables in one’s front yard and keeping chickens. In some states utility companies are pushing through punitive taxes on people who add solar panels to their homes. Vagrancy laws, and laws against living in one’s car, criminalize the very act of existing without a job or a fixed place of residence.

One of the happiest classes of people in English history were the land-poor peasants of the 18th century who, with cottages built on the common waste, and the freedom to hunt and gather berries and fuel in the fens and woods, and pasture a few pigs or a cow on the common, were able to live comfortable and accept agricultural wage labor from the “squire” when it suited them. The landed classes of England enclosed the wastes and common pasture, and tore down the cottages, because they couldn’t stand having a class of laboring folk who could afford to live comfortably while taking work or leaving it as they saw fit.

Eliminating the barriers to self-employment and comfortable low-cost subsistence would have the effect of recreating the conditions under which this class of cottagers thrived, and enable ordinary people to survive comfortably without depending on wage labor for a capitalist boss for subsistence. -Kevin Carson http://c4ss.org/content/23685

 

 

What this makes me consider are the coming implications of Ethereum, and p2p loan systems. I already know what its like to be a part of a food coop, as well, in terms of brick and mortar and not crypto-finance. This is also sort of in line with the ways in which small artist would go about promoting their work over p2p systems. And I suppose countless other implications.