Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Don't let a single individual's opinion set your work's value." video.

  1. I dunno exactly what's the discourse for minimum wage in the US, but if it's anything like what has happened in Brazil, it's quite simple and kinda endless really. On one side you have idealistic utopic types (or sometimes just short sighted people that are only looking it from their own perspective) that will always preach about minimum wage having to be a baseline for anyone with a job to have the very basic living standards. Which is something very hard and very broad to define, because you can have anything from a single person living on rent in a small town where food and other basic needs are kinda cheap, to large families living in capital cities where real estate is impossibly expensive and food anywhere will cost double than the countryside. But since the cause looks so noble, people won't think about it much. And I don't question that is it a noble cause, but if you don't match it with the reality of the economy, then the preaching becomes kinda empty. On the other side you will have people facing the reality that it's unsustainable to maintain a business that has to pay all that for each and every one of their employees. It won't make sense to have a business in the first place. Sure you definitely have some business owners that just don't want to let go of their profit margins, but when you are talking about minimum wage for all, things will by far and large affect more small owners that are already struggling to maintain their business afloat. Idealists will often only look at major companies though, because that helps their discourse. For most countries the reality lies in between. It comes down to something like this: sure you can have a minimum wage value that enables people to live a comfortable life, perhaps even having access to some luxuries and stuff, no matter where they live. But would you then have businesses willing to pay for that? Would you have enough businesses to give jobs to all these people? Would it even make sense to create your own business under such circustances, and how much money you'd need to do that? The money has to come from somewhere. Jacking up minimum wage without taking the other side as a factor only creates a couple of things: unemployment and informal jobs. So in turn, you get to another question: is it worth creating an economy in which less people get paid a standard living wage, while a whole lot of people is either unemployed or working informally? With less businesses being opened because of the risks involved? Which in turn creates less competition, and a more stagnant economy? It's a very fine balance. In Brazil it's particularly bad because for each employee you have, the business is also burdened with this huge ammount of taxes you have to pay for the government, which effectively means you'll be paying close to double the wage the employee is expecting to make. Which is ridiculous. Well, ridiculous for a country that has a government as corrupt as ours, perhaps not so much for others. I'm not even mentioning all the tons and tons of other costs involved in creating a business in the first place, because with brazilian bureaucracy and taxation it's kind of a miracle we have people willing to start a business in the first place, but employees are definitely the most expensive part of the equation, and it's kinda easy to call business owners greedy when you don't have a business of your own to see how hard it can be to keep it afloat. If you effectively use the government or law to oblige business owners to pay a certain ammount of money, it sure is good to avoid abuses, situations close to slave labor, among other non desirable scenarios. But as most things, governmental and law control needs limits. You put too much in one side of the balance you risk crashing the whole thing altogether.
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