Recent protests organized by the Left to get McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and others to raise the wages of their employees have raised the issue of a “living wage,” or the minimum needed to cover one’s basic needs. But businesses cannot operate profitably if they are required to employ people at wages based on the financial needs of the employees.
It is not the responsibility of businesses to set wages and salaries according to what someone else determines is a “living wage.” The price for someone's work has to be determined by what that work is worth. And the business owner has to determine if hiring someone at that wage will help his business to be more profitable. Then, only if the labor force isn’t adequate to fill those positions, the price goes up to attract the work they need.
The "living wage" is essentially a Marxist concept. But Karl Marx himself, in 1875 in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, actually argued against attempts to implement concepts like the “living wage” in a free capitalist society, saying it couldn’t happen until violent revolution had destroyed capitalism and his “dictatorship of the proletariat” had forcibly removed every vestige of capitalism:
“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor...has vanished...and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can...society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
Modern American liberalism has become a form of Marxism, abandoning the method that Marx saw as necessary, of violently overthrowing capitalism, trying to bring about his unachievable utopia of communism by gradually passing it into law. But both paths lead to destruction.
In last year’s presidential election campaign, Mitt Romney was portrayed as being beholden to some kind of robber barons who are squeezing their wealth out of poor people to make them rich. As the American left typically does, they concocted a false picture of their political opponent and did everything they could to spread this false image.
This false portrayal of Romney also stems from the Marxist concept of class struggle. Marx believed that all wealth, or as he called it, capital, comes from capitalists essentially stealing it from laborers, leaving the laborers destitute and making the bosses all fat-cats at their expense.
Yet we have nearly two hundred years of the history of the Industrial Age, and its responsibility for bringing about absolutely amazing societal advancement to the world, to disprove Marx's theories.
Capitalism has caused society as a whole to prosper, and those who partake of it through their labor and through their investments, become beneficiaries. What stops this process of development is when wealth (capital) becomes a source for government to use to impose the ideas of a few on society as a whole.
Rather than working through charities to provide help to the needy, it has somehow became government's responsibility to make sure everyone had their basic needs met, regardless of how many people were gaming the system to steal this wealth. As more and more of the responsibility for advancing society falls on government institutions, more and more of individual initiative is sapped from society and innovation is sacrificed, replaced by government studies and burdensome bureaucratic institutions.
Government bureaucracy grows like cancer, consuming everything in its path
Then the government bureaucracy grows like cancer, consuming everything in its path. But it is time we begin to excise this cancer by making major cuts in the size of the federal government and restoring the role of the states and the people in our system of federalism.
It is really alarming to me how quickly and completely those faithful to the leftist-Marxist message take what their propagandists are saying and run with it. They don't realize how they have opened themselves up to tyrannical rule by abandoning the Constitution and trying to impose their big-government ways at any cost.
Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years
