Livable Wages

Economics is not what anyone intelligent bases their worldview around, as the most explicitly philosophical sides of economics depend on preceding truths about morality and politics, which in turn depend on logic and broader metaphysics.  Economics, especially since all economic systems are in practice social constructs even though there are conceptual truths about economics that hold in the absence of social systems, is far from primary.  This has not deterred either liberals or conservatives from basing a great deal of their prominent strategies and claims around how society should operate at a financial level.

Liberals have their own conceptual misunderstandings that motivate them to believe or say asinine things about economics, to be sure, such as the myth that abusive applications of capitalism are direct expressions of the idea of capitalism.  Conservatives as a whole, though, like to pretend to be rational despite their legions of assumptions, errors, and logical fallacies that are often just the inverse of whatever stupidity liberals advocate.  They will straw man socialistic redistribution of wealth as this inherently tyrannical thing even though it could be voluntary.

Their fear of socialism, and even of ideas that are not actually unaltered socialism, spurs them on to viciously despise anything that involves a change to the American economy as it currently is.  This means they tend to oppose increasing the minimum wage across the nation, but it also means they usually condemn individual companies for paying high hourly wages.  Why is this ironic as it relates to the conservative abhorrence of everything the word socialism is associated with rightly or wrongly?  Actually, whether one uses socialism to refer to government intervention in economies to enforce restrictions or redistribute wealth or to refer to a proto-communist society, the irony is large, and not just because livable wages are not conceptually or societally linked to socialism whatsoever.

The irony is not even that socialism is morally obligatory or automatically better than capitalism, but there would be no need for anything resembling the socialism conservatives despise in the first place if people earned enough to live without government intervention or the redistribution of wealth, and yet conservatives routinely oppose almost any attempt to update minimum wage laws at the federal level or practices at the level of individual companies.  If people were paid wages that consistently kept up with the rising costs of basic living, there would not even be any crisis for people to rightly or wrongly call upon the government for wealth redistribution or free market restrictions to solve!

Livable wages have nothing to do with socialism or communism despite conservative paranoia, yet conservatives are willing to misrepresent socialism despite claiming intellectual clarity for the sake of the status quo.  This is the essence of conservativism: its adherents wish for things to stay as they are or almost exactly like as they are or were in some imagined golden age of American politics.  The more a person is not opposed to changes to the status quo, the less conservative a person is.  Combined with the fact that a person can accept the few specific things conservatives are right about simply because they are true and not out of a connection with conservatism, conservativism's irrational default to traditions and slow change even where change is morally required make it a philosophical abomination of a political worldview.  Economics is just a part of where these delusions are expressed.