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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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And since the floor never changes, this means the left-wing view results in everyone in poverty forever.

“The real minimum wage is always zero.”

At age 18 when I read that it became instantly obvious to me how few people understand this. This hasn’t changed much in the interim.

I don't think we're using "the floor" in the same sense - I mean "the floor" in the sense of how badly off the least fortunate members of society can get, and that can clearly be altered. The life of the man who has nothing could be improved considerably if we ended homelessness or gave everyone a UBI; it could be considerably worsened if we outlawed all charity or legalized selling oneself into slavery. You may think that raising the floor from its current position would have negative externalities, you may even think we should lower the floor from said current position, but it's trivially false that it "never changes".

I don't think we're using "the floor" in the same sense - I mean "the floor" in the sense of how badly off the least fortunate members of society can get, and that can clearly be altered.

It can be altered in that it can be made worse that the natural floor by instituting torture camps or something similar. But as many cities have demonstrated, some people are bottomless pits of need, and cannot be raised above that natural floor.

some people are bottomless pits of need, and cannot be raised above that natural floor

Perhaps some, but not all of them. Even if you believe that no significant percentage of modern America's homeless could be meaningfully helped, it's surely undeniable that other places and eras have had much more prevalent homelessness than just that fringe of irrecoverables. The situation of the average unemployable pauper in 2026 America is vastly superior to that of the average unemployable pauper in Dickensian London, and I'm willing to call that raising the floor.

But I think even that is a stretch. Certainly a lot of modern homeless people are wretches who are not realistically going to live decently on their own again. But how did they get this way? Widespread access to hard drugs seems to be a massive slice of the pie. Succeed in massively curtailing access to such drugs (via whichever policy you think is most likely to succeed) and you've already "raised the floor" in a very significant way - however unemployable and disadvantaged you are, you'll be massively less likely to end up as a shambling brain-rotted junkie. It's not a natural inevitability that if you're homeless you'll become a debilitated addict. That's by no means the only way I can think of to help those extreme cases, but I wanted something stark and obvious and not redistributive in nature, or requiring any level of cooperation from the homeless themselves.

Perhaps some, but not all of them.

If we can't raise the floor for some people, that still means that we can't raise the floor, because that's what it means to be a floor--it's the lowest person.

I get where you're coming from, but to overextend the floor metaphor, I feel like over-focusing on uniquely disturbed individuals who are not simply unproductive, but will actively ruin anything that is given to them - the "bottomless pits of need" - is like saying that you can't raise the floor because there's this crazy bastard with a shovel who will dig his way down to the basement however high the floor is. Like. Okay. But we can still talk about how low a randomly-chosen individual can expect to get if they wind up penniless and friendless.

This is what I was trying to get at with the the "average unemployed pauper" stuff at the end of that same paragraph. If, while otherwise under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, you are told that you are going to be penniless and unemployable in a given society - i.e. on the lowest rung there is, if not personally the single lowest person - how bad should you expect your lot to be? Maybe there's a fixed probability (corresponding to a fixed percentage of the population) that you're going to turn out to be one of the irrecoverable wretches. But that's not the only term in that calculation, and I think it's fair to talk colloquially about improving your expected outcome in that situation in terms of "raising the floor".

The more you improve the lot of the people at the bottom, the more the people who remain at the bottom are going to be the truly hopeless. If society is good enough at helping people, the ones at the bottom will all be hopeless because nobody else stays at the bottom for any length of time. You end up with a floor that just can't be raised any more.

But we can still talk about how low a randomly-chosen individual can expect to get if they wind up penniless and friendless.

We can talk about it, but not in any meaningful way. The metric isn't available. And it wouldn't be a floor.

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