Around the world workers' day is celebrated on May 1.
In the United States, thanks to President Grover Cleveland, the homage to the huddled masses takes place the first Monday of September.
Of great interest to people in the United States, as newspaper headlines point out, is how much other people earn.
No one - or almost anyone - writes on the editorial pages of the media works at McDonald's or earns the minimum wage. However, virtually every one of them has an opinion about how much low-income earners should earn.
A "living wage" is what they say they want. A salary of $ 30,000 per year has been discussed.
Of course a minimum for the whole country is absurd. It costs much more to live in Manhattan than in the Ozarks. And living with Mom and Dad is much less expensive than having a place of your own.
But we are not as interested in practical details as theory.
We have been told that people working at McDonald's need to earn more. But what about those who write for editorial pages? Should they earn less?
If well-educated and well-paid press employees can decide the salary of McDonald's workers, surely those who turn over hamburgers will have the right to set the salaries of classes that are engaged in quackery, intrusion and empty proposals .
If that happened, our guess is that the well-know-all paid today would surely end up with a pay cut. What seems right and fair.
We are at a McDonald's and a worker who collects the minimum wage serves our order. We get what we pay for and settle for the transaction; we do not reproach the worker for his reward.
We read the newspaper, on the other hand, and they put us sentences and nonsense.
The self-deception of the controllers
Generally, we get decent service and good value for the "blue collar" worker.
What do we get from the white collar clown?
Pain.
Of course, there are only two possibilities. Either wages are determined by a free giving and receiving between those who offer their work and those who want to buy it. Or someone sets wages according to their own standards.
The good people want to use other people's money to raise their worst-paid wages, but they do not mention theirs.
They do not even offer to pay more for their hamburgers so McDonald's can pay more for its workers.
And what about the poor who can not find work?
If the minimum wage were raised, there would surely be more, either because McDonald's could not afford to hire as many people with higher wages or because it would have replaced its minimum wage workers by machines.
But the price-setters are so satisfied with what they think is the ideal solution that they do not bother to look at reality. If they did, they would see that setting prices always - always! - makes people poorer, not richer.
However, we will give them the benefit of the doubt by trying to imagine how the world could be improved by establishing wages for other people.
A happy endeavor
Let us begin with a modest nod to justice: If it makes sense to establish the wages of the least among us: why not do it with everyone else?
If people who do not participate in a labor transaction can know better than the participants what the terms should be, why not fix the salaries of editorialists, editors, CEOs, sports celebrities, movie stars ...?
At the lower end they may be stingy, but there is extravagant generosity in the other.
If one side should be fixed by law, why not all?
You can see what a happy experiment this would be for a bold bureaucrat. Instead of allowing the market to set prices, we will put them ourselves.
We will also set prices on the stock exchange. And we will manipulate the labor market, allocating wages where we think they should be.
So, here we go.
This is our proposal of annual salaries for the following trades according to how good we think they do to society.
Entrepreneurs (including their editor), poets, inventors and metaphysicians: USD 100,000
Priests, teachers, mathematicians, scientists, pilots, nurses and filmmakers: USD 85,000
Corporate CEOs, prostitutes, writers, waiters and hedge fund managers: $ 75,000
Drivers, workers, vendors, vendors, farmers, firefighters and police: USD 50,000
Psychologists, chiropractors, doctors (including wizards) and financial planners: USD 40,000
Government employees (not included in previous groups), politicians, drug traffickers, world improvers, economists, counterfeiters, psychiatrists, sociologists, political scientists, and pollsters: $ 30,000
We do not mean that this list is exhaustive or definitive. It is just a suggestion - a starting point towards a "fairer" distribution of national income.)
Sincerly,
@paolonews