Todd, you’re playing dumb to avoid engaging with the actual argument. You may not have explicitly said low-wage workers are worthless, but your entire attitude towards them, your refusal to acknowledge their right to a living wage, implies exactly that. If you truly believed they had value, you wouldn’t be so flippant about them earning wages that don’t even cover their basic survival. Instead, you defend a system where massive corporations pay so little that their workers have to rely on public assistance just to survive, effectively forcing taxpayers to subsidize corporate greed.
As for your attempt at pedantic word games, "How much are basic living expenses?", you know exactly what I mean, you just don’t want to acknowledge it because doing so would expose the flaws in your argument. Basic living expenses mean enough to afford food, housing, utilities, transportation, and healthcare in the area where they live, things every worker needs to function in society. The idea that this is too "arbitrary" to define is just a lazy excuse to avoid acknowledging reality. It’s no different than asking, “How do you define cold vs. warm vs. hot?” or “What makes someone rich?”, we may not have a single universal number, but that doesn’t mean these things don’t exist or can’t be reasonably determined. Durrrrrrrr.
Moreover, Workers absolutely produce the wealth that billionaires hoard. You scoff at the idea that mass production is a social endeavor, but explain to me how a factory, a warehouse, or a distribution center runs itself. The machines don’t program themselves, the products don’t move themselves, and the services don’t provide themselves. Without human labor, none of it works. The billionaire sitting in his high-rise isn’t the one making the products, stocking the shelves, or loading the trucks. He’s not the one answering calls at customer service, delivering goods, or assembling anything on the production line.
The entire capitalist model depends on human labor until the day it doesn’t, and that’s the day capitalism collapses on itself because without paying consumers, there is no market.
And finally, your response to workers owning their workplaces, “They should start saving their money to do that”, is laughable. Do you seriously believe that workers making $14 an hour can somehow save up enough to buy out the billionaires who own their companies? Is that how Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or the Walton family got rich? Did they “save their wages” to build their empires? No. They exploited labor, connections, tax loopholes, government subsidies, and inherited wealth to get where they were.
Workers owning their enterprises isn’t something that will happen through individual savings accounts, it will happen when society demands it, just as we once demanded an end to monarchy and political dictatorships. We recognize democracy as essential in government, yet you defend economic dictatorship in the workplace as if it’s some natural law. It’s not.
And just as history has shown that power must be wrestled from the hands of kings, the same must happen with capitalists who hoard and control wealth they did not create. Workers should own their workplaces because they built them, they sustain them, and without them, there is nothing. That’s reality, no matter how much you try to dismiss it.
