>You can make 20k flipping burgers at McDonalds. 20k is enough to build up a safety cushion.

If you are single with no dependents, live in a cheap area, and live close to work, maybe.

We are having a general discussion (thank you for the thoughtful discussion, BTW), and not to get too deep into specific policy plans but I'd like to see a two tiered approach.

First tier: Long term employees living off of the wage. There is a minimum, living wage. It should be enough to support a person and at least one dependent at 40 hours a a week. There should be a national living wage which represents the absolute floor and state and local living wages that can add to that based on local cost of living differences.

Second tier: Short term employees or employees not living off of the wage. No minimum wage at all at this tier. Intended for teenagers, the elderly that just want to work, the independently wealthy or otherwise supported that just want to work for pocket money or because the structure of the organization doesn't allow for volunteers.

This would be enforced simply by the government charging businesses if their employees file for welfare for the cost of the welfare + administrative cost + a small penalty.

If your business requires long term, well trained employees you'd better pay them enough that the public is not subsidizing them.

However, if you can get away with using teenagers, college students, or the bored elderly, and people that generally don't have to work to survive if they don't want to, then more power to you. Pay what you want.

>Not different at all. If that fool loses his job, he'll lose every last thing he has, because he doesn't own it and the bank will take it back. Yes, his path to homelessness was more comfortable, but he'll end up in the same place.

Considering how much he's making, I'd say he probably has some sort of personal human capital built up and is not in nearly as dire a situation as someone who hasn't had that opportunity that ends up at zero or worse.

> I find the idea of forcibly taking from one person to give to another abhorrent.

Really? I find the idea of paying to live in a society that provides much more value for any amount of money I can give perfectly acceptable -- certainly more desirable than the alternative. You don't think you'd benefit from living in a society where no one would have to worry about starving, going homeless, or affording their meds?

I'm not advocating this out of the goodness of my heart or to prevent human suffering. It is a cold calculation that happens to look like altruism. The highest expected utility for a system of transactions (the market) can only be achieved if the group of transactions is overall positive. The only way to guarantee this result is if every transaction within that system is positive. The only way to guarantee that every transaction is positive is if all parties to the transaction see a net gain in value. When the best alternative to a negotiated agreement is negative and the other party knows this, they can exploit it (and they will if they are rational). This means one party loses and the other gains value or utility. This is the situation the desperately poor are in when they sell their time. They are in a known bad position. What was a guarantee is now a question. Does the gain in value of the one party override the loss in value of the other? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It is hard to guarantee a win-win transaction in every case for many different reasons (information asymmetry, externalities not taken into account etc.) but in this case it is easy and it affects a huge swath of our society -- just guarantee they can walk away from a transaction without coming to harm. Just that simple. Looks altruistic but is really about maximizing overall utility. Why play with finding the spot where exploitation tips the scale into overall negative value if we don't have to?