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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   29223 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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the wages for agriculture go up

Americans famously love when the price of consumer goods go up

Also Japan imports 60% of its calories

They would love when the price of consumer goods go up if their wages go up as well.

Well only the fruit pickers wage would go up. The mechanics wage would not, and the price of their food would.

If everyone's wage goes up equally you're just describing inflation.

It’s crucial to understand why this isn’t the case. The mechanic competes in wages with the fruit picker (in an economy with an absence of illegal labor), not directly but transitively, because the mechanic competes with somebody who competes with somebody who […] competes with the fruit-picker. Increasing opportunity for the lower class increases it for the lower-middle, which increases it for the middle. Everyone’s QoL and wages increase. Food prices increase, but wages increase higher than they for the lower and middle. It won’t increase wages for the upper white collar professionals, because there’s a strict barrier where they simply would never consider entering a trade or working as a chef even if wages in these places rose considerable, which is because of the class association. (And remember remittance payments: 66 billion yearly just for Mexico!)

There is no free lunch. If this was as pure EV-positive as you imply, why isn't any country doing this and reaping the rewards as opposed to this current sub-optimal status quo?

This would redistribute surplus from consumers and farm owners to farm laborers. As someone who's generally in favor of economically redistributive policies, I guess I don't have it, although it's a pretty blunt instrument.

Also your argument implies that minimum wage increases are a pure upside policy too btw

It would redistribute from “all consumers” to “lower / middle class”, because more competitive lower wage job openings would have a domino effect in that whole class but not above it. In effect, it redistributes from rich to poor and middle class. There’s a cut-off, because our professional classes seldom consider managing a retail store or something instead of entering finance or law. But the retail store manager had considered being a teacher, the teacher had considered working in hospitality, the […] down to agricultural workers. Any small scale model you imagine would show this effect. The same happened with the peasantry after the plague, when the number of agricultural workers decreased so they could compete for wages, but there was a social cut-off preventing nobles and traders from ever considering any work beneath their social level.

The eminent refused to take on menial roles, not because they could not perform these “unskilled” tasks, but because to do so would be unworthy of their social rank, and it was unthinkable to abandon that social and labor hierarchy. Farm work was peasant work, whether performed by serfs bound to a particular manor, tenant farmers or wage laborers hired by the year or the season. But the staggering mortality of the Black Death reduced this previously sufficient peasant population sharply enough to create a severe labor shortage.

This is because we have an enormous amount of wealth “stuck” in the upper class. You can unstuck it by making them pay more for things, sending the payments to those poorer. There was a brief period where this was done with programmers during the dot com boom, but now there is an excess of domestic programmers and also they are importing overseas semi-slave labor.

your argument implies that minimum wage increases are a pure upside policy

If you have too many workers it would leave many unemployed. Hence the whole “deport 22 million and stop letting more in”.

It seems like we agree on the knock on effects more than I initially thought

If you're all for redistributing wealth from the middle class down then we are brothers in arms

I think that would end up being very unpopular, but c'est la vie

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