|
first off, like dippin said there's probably not alot of disagreement that the current distribution of wealth is not the indication of some aristotlean shangri-la in which people who are Better make more and people who are Deficient make less because well, dammit, that's just the way in which it ought to be in this the best of all possible worlds. and this wasn't even a caricature (though i place no weight on knowing aristotle as an entry fee).
there are alot of basic problems with capitalist organization itself that can follow from pushing at the distribution of wealth.
i'm not sure that it makes alot of sense here to go too far into it, though i suppose we could if it could take the form of a conversation. but folk come at things differently.
anyway, i think that a global minimum wage would be an interesting move. who would implement such a thing? well there we have one of the more interesting questions posed right away. the reorganization of capitalist production (capital and other commodity flows) has outstripped the control of any particular nation-state. this is obvious but politically we've not caught up with it at all. pan's suggestions above are reasonable if you assume the nation-state is still a viable center of control (it isn't) and appeal (it is, but the meaning of that democratic feedback loop is undercut by the loss of meaningful regulatory/political control).
so at one level, the problem seems to me either people advocate for a fracturing of commodity flows in order to make the system amenable to control by nation-states again--which ain't gonna happen, even though it seems to me the center of what more conservative populism is about (to the extent that it's coherently about a single thing)---or there has to be some other kind of trans-national institutional/regulator infrastructure put into place--which raises all kinds of problems about representation, responsiveness to public pressure, etc.
one way or another, this problem is going to have to be addressed. it seems to me that we're currently stuck in a kind of massive political problem, an indication of what can happen when the categories that order a sense of the world fall out of phase with the world and cant be adapted. which is kinda what collapse of empire looks like. but i digress.
the meaning of a universal minimum wage could be shaped by the institutions that implement it. you'd assume something like this could not happen in a political or policy vacuum, that it would have contexts and consent generated rooted in the control over context, yes? and i would think that a trade-off profit versus the continued stability of the social system that enables profit to be extracted would be a pretty strong argument, wouldn't you?
i don't see tarrifs as a viable alternative to a universal minimum wage. this follows in a more or less circular way from the premise above, the one that claims the nation-state is effectively cooked.
there's more, but i gots to do some other stuff.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|