Let's me just start by saying that I understand and respect your argument, and your motivations for them. I am sure you're a good hearted person, who just wants to help his fellow citizens, and that is a good thing, and one in which i feel we can agree as a goal to achieve.

Please do not take my arguments against your proposals, as insulting or demeaning, that is in no way my intention. I only mean to point out where their flaws lie, and why they will not work as you expect them to.

Let's break your arguments down to their core:

>You keep saying that businesses, in effect, ought to be the sole arbitrator of what the value of labor is, and any infringement on that ability somehow limits people's options and that said limitation is more exploitative than whatever the business is doing.

>You've gone further to say that it would be better for someone to be trapped in poverty working some dead-end job that pays only the absolute minimum to get any worker, with no possible avenue out via education or entrepreneurship or whatever, than to not have access to any job at all.

>This system is deeply flawed in that it allows for the potential value of a person to be "zero", in that they cannot access base necessities of life (shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc) much less the "luxuries" of equity like education.

You misunderstood the argument here. I state that the economic value of hiring someone can be less than the cost of hiring that someone. In addition, I stated that if a minimum wage is imposed, unless that minimum wage is so low that every persons value added is greater than it (in which case the minimum wage would affect no one), then such a minimum wage would merely result in those people who are affected go from X to Zero.

The problem that you're having here is you are confusing the cost of labor (and value) with peoples necessities for modern life, when the two things are not related at all.

>I suggest what if the system was flipped? What if the population got to decide what was best for itself, instead of businesses.

The population already decides what is best for itself, indeed it is a minimum wage that actively prevents them from doing so by closing off their best options and condemning them to subsisting on the public dole.

>Instead of businesses setting the sole value of slices of a human life (which they've done in the past and has led to things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things. We already do this in part through public education, which even in some cases provides the "food" and "shelter" components. (This is obviously limited by the rest of the student's socioeconomic circumstances, but the point remains: this is not a foreign concept in US thinking.)

>If citizens had access to this base standard, it (a) prevents the problem of human life being valued at "zero" and having such a thing as a poverty cycle, (b) removes the burden of healthcare from businesses' pocketbooks, which will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses, and (c) give a lot more flexibility to the population in the choices they can make.

I am going to assume that you are talking about doing so via a UBI, as you discussed in a previous comment, rather than through some central planning system of goods production and distribution?

If so, then that would actually work much better than the current system with means test, bureaucracy and other massive inefficiencies.

That being said, you need to consider the terrible incentive structure involved with the statement "we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things."

On a fundamental level this implies that the cost involved with providing these benefits are "fixed" per person, and scale with population, regardless of the economies ability to sustain such expense. What happens when the expense gets so great that it cannot be sustained?

And if you "index" it to economic performance, how do you feel that cutting everyones benefits in the middle of an economic depression will go in an election?

Do you truly believe people will be content keeping such a system as is over time? What stops the creeping increase of benefits?

Furthermore, if the benefits are sufficiently large, what sort of motivation will people have to work at all? And indeed, those who do work and generate wealth, why must they be punished for it (by being forced to sustain those who don't even try)?

Finally, a final question, you say:

>will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses

Why is this a goal of yours at all? Why do you think that interfering with the way businesses work will increase the pie? Why do you want to pick winners and losers?

>To this last point: In my school district, there was a group of anonymous donors ~20 years ago who assembled a fund that would pay for the college education of any student who graduated from that district, with some minimum required GPA. In effect, free college, if you make it through the public school system. (The assumed motivations of these corporate donors being to increase the highly-educated labor pool with ties to the region, that they could then hire from.) We had a graduation rate of less than 50%, in part because most of the families of the students were so poor that they absolutely needed the added income of the student to stay afloat--and they couldn't work a job and manage school at the same time. So they dropped out, and merrily became part of the poverty cycle. UBI, or something like it, would have prevented that.

The problem is that such benefits would have the opposite effect, because the thing that most keeps people in poverty is not lack of money, but lack of motivation and lack of options. UBI would remove motivation, like any other form of ameliorating their situation would do. And Minimum wage laws (and other restrictions) would remove their options.

I understand we're you're coming from, but I have seen first hand how those sorts of policies don't work, and how lack of cash and education isn't as much of a barrier to escaping poverty as creeping regulations are.

My grandfather was born in 1929 in a tiny village of twenty people in a poor mountainous area in interior Portugal, growing up he had to walk 20 kilometers each day to the nearest town to attend primary school, which he attended for only 4 years. This is not a rich area, and the conditions there, both at the time and today would be considered absolute poverty. For reference, electricity and running water (and sewage) only arrived to the area in the 1990s. His father was a woodchopper, and his relatives and ancestors were subsistence farmers.

At age 13 his father gave him a bus ticket to lisbon, enough money for 2 nights at a shared hostel, some food and enough cash for him to purchase a bus ticket back home. He went to Lisbon and began working in construction. He eventually resigned and started his own company building apartment buildings, single family houses, and other such construction work. He was never wildly rich, but he was able to build himself and my grandmother a perfectly respectable middle class life.

He did this with 4 years of schooling, a bus ticket and a couple of days of "runway". There was no minimum wage. There was no health and safety regulations. There was no public health service. There was no free education (beyond the 4 years of primary education).

The reason he managed to do this wasn't because he "had a leg up on everyone else".

He did this off the back of his own hard work, good decisions, a little bit of luck, and most importantly because no one was stopping him.

If there was a minimum wage back then, he would not have been able to be hired or hire people himself.

If there was restrictions and licensing requirements on construction, he would not have been able to build the houses he sold.

If there was age limitations on being able to work, he would not have been able to come to Lisbon at age 13.

Each of these limitations and regulations may individually make perfect sense, however collectively they ossify any form of social mobility.

If I were born today in that village, I would not be able to take the same path out that he took. I would have to find something else, or I would be stuck in that poverty cycle you described, and I would be stuck there not through lack of intelligence, or because the poverty is keeping me there, but because the well intentioned policies you are supporting would keep me there and prevent me from escaping.