Going back a hundred year in time, we find that most middle class families had a servant of some kind helping out in the house. There were also assistants and helpers of all kinds at the workplace. There were secretaries at the office. There were helpers in restaurant kitchens. There were juniors everywhere.
Very little of this remains.
The reason for this is simple. The cost of hiring a junior worker is now so high that hardly anyone can afford such luxury. However, this is not due to competition from higher income jobs available to those who would otherwise be servants. It is due entirely to the minimum wage law.
The servants are not in employment somewhere else. They are unemployed. They are at home drawing welfare, watching TV and seeing their lives pass by with little purpose or sense of pride.
The money to pay the idle servants is taken from the middle class in the form of taxes. There is therefore no net economic gain in this new arrangement. The middle class is just not getting any service in return for their money. Instead, middle class people find themselves running the errands and doing the trivial tasks that their servants would otherwise have done.
The result is the current situation where we have an overburdened middle class and a lower class with no sense of purpose.
No comments:
Post a Comment