Resolved: A just government ought to require employers to pay a living wage

Intro- Renowned 20th Century Inventor and Visionary Buckminster Fuller said "We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." It is because I agree with Buckminster Fuller that I negate the resolution: A Just governments ought to require employers to pay a living wage. For the purposes of this debate, I will accept my opponents value and criterion. I will argue that I achieve their framework much more effectively than they do. The thesis of my argument will be that requiring employers to pay a living wage continues to place the burden of the social world on the private sector, continuing to endorse the fallacy of the private sphere. In today"s debate, I will support the idea that a just government would provide for its citizens, not through requiring employers to pay their employees, but instead, through providing directly for its citizens. Contention One: "Ensuring Employers Pay" is a Mask for Exploitation Sub-Point A: Making employees dependent on their employers is a method of ensuring ideological compliance with the system. McNally (1996)The contradictory character of working class consciousness is a highly dynamic phenomenon. To begin with, there is no homogeneous consciousness within the working class. Among a single group of workers, some will veer towards near-total acceptance of the ideas of bosses, supervisors, heads of state, and so on, while others will lean towards an almost thorough-going opposition to such figures. Between these two positions one will find the majority of workers. But their consciousness will not be fixed. Great events"mass strikes and demonstrations, union drives, and so on"coupled with the organized propagation of oppositional ideas can contribute to significant radicalisation; while defeats, setbacks, and the decline of oppositional discourse can have a deeply conversing effect. Sub-Point B: Forcing private employers to pay a "living wage" is precisely how capitalism masks itself and preserves itself into violence. Deleuze and Guattari (1972)The capitalist machine does not run the risk of becoming mad, it is mad from one end to the other and from the beginning, and this is the source of its rationality, Marx's black humor, the source of Capital, is his fascination with such a machine: how it came to be assembled, on what foundation of decoding and deterritorialization; how it works, always more decoded, always more deterritorialized; how its operation grows more relentless with the development of the axiomatic, the combination of the flows; how it produces the terrible single class of gray gentlemen who keep up the machine; how it does not run the risk of dying all alone, but rather of making us die, by provoking to the very end investments of desire that do not even go by way of a deceptive and subjective ideology, and that lead us to cry out to the very end, Long live capital in all its reality, in all its objective dissimulation! Except in ideology, there has never been a humane, liberal, and paternal capitalism. Capitalism is defined by a cruelty having no parallel in the despotic regime of terror. Wage increases and improvements in the standard of living are realities, but realities that derive from a given supplementary axiom that capitalism is always capable of adding to its axiomatic in terms of an enlargement of its limits: let's create the New Deal; let's cultivate and recognize strong unions; let's promote participation, the single class; let's take a step toward Russia, which is taking so many toward us; etc. Contention Two: A Just Governments Provides an Income to All Sub-Point A: Paying those lucky enough to be employed a living wage does not go far enough. Only providing guaranteed employment or a guaranteed minimum income can secure dignity for all. Luther King Jr. (1967)But dignity is also corroded by poverty no matter how poetically we invest the humble with simple graces and charm. No worker can maintain his morale or sustain his spirit if in the marketplace his capacities are declared to be worthless to society. The Negro is no longer ashamed that he is black" he should never have permitted himself to accept the absurd concept that white is more virtuous than black, but he was crushed by the propaganda that superiority had a pale countenance. That day is fast coming to an end. However, in his search for human dignity he is handicapped by the stigma of poverty in a society whose measure of value revolves about money. If the society changes its concepts by placing the responsibility on its system, not on the individual, and guarantees secure employment or a minimum income, dignity will come within reach of all. Sub-Point B: In order to solve our problems, we must deal with global poverty. We have the resources to deal with these problems, we just lack the will. Fuller (1969)Another grave problem that must be solved if we are to live creatively in our world house is that of poverty on an international scale. Like a monstrous octopus, it stretches its choking, prehensile tentacles into lands and villages all over the world. Two-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night. They are undernourished, ill-housed and shabbily clad. Many of them have no houses or beds to sleep in. Their only beds are the sidewalks of the cities and the dusty roads of the villages. Most of these poverty-stricken children have never seen a physician or a dentist. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it. Today, therefore, the question on the agenda must read: why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? In other words, I doubt that there can be a stabilization of the population without a prior stabilization of economic resources. Contention Three: A living wage increases corporations and decreases small businesses. A living wage decreases the profits of the small businesses that essentially boost the production of small rural towns. According to Karen Mills (2013) It's not a just government that creates jobs; it's small business. Our job is to make sure they have the access to capital, the access to contracting opportunities, and the help, advice and mentoring that they need to go out and be successful. A living wage will increase the probability of these small businesses going under. Corporations and those who work at this low class and low standard of living are the ones that thrive. We need to think of the effect on small businesses first before affirming a resolution like this.