The Real Reason Many Conservatives Hate A Living-Wage Minimum Wage
Their Ethical Code Says It’s Morally Wrong To Pay People More Than They Think Their Low-Level Abilities Entitle Them To Earn
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
Before you decide that I’m unfairly bashing conservatives, let me tell you that this article isn’t about all conservatives. It’s an observation about the psychology of some conservatives.
Do You Have This Personality Trait?
You’re at the supermarket. Only three registers are open and each has a long line. You pick one and ten minutes later you’re almost up to the cashier. You look at the long line to your right and you notice a man with three items in his basket approaching a woman near the head of that line. He greets her and she lets him go ahead of her!
You find this upsetting. You followed all the rules. You waited in your line for ten minutes. Now this guy comes out of nowhere and cuts to the head of that other line! That upsets you because you think it’s not fair.
Do you want to complain to somebody? Do you want someone behind the woman to tap her on the shoulder and tell her that she can’t do that? If the clerk told the guy that he had to go to the end of the line would you be pleased?
Anger Over Someone Else Getting Something For Free That You Had To Work For
The German word “schadenfreude” describes the pleasure a person feels when they see someone they don’t like suffer.
Is there a word for the anger felt by someone who waited their turn in their line and then saw someone else get away with cutting to the front of a different line?
Do the Germans have a word that describes the anger you feel when someone else gets something for free that you had to work for?
Do You Get Upset About What’s In Someone Else’s Wallet?
That sort of anger about someone else getting something for free that you had to work for runs contrary to an old piece of life wisdom:
“Don’t worry about what’s in the other guy’s wallet. Just worry about what’s in your own wallet.”
Whether or not someone cuts in another line has no effect on you. It doesn’t make your trip to the head of your line any faster or slower. Though it has nothing to do with your well being, if you’re angry about it anyway then you’re one of those people who worry about what’s in the other guy’s wallet.
Other Wallet Worriers
There’s a certain personality type that does that. Let’s call them “Other Wallet Worriers.”
Have you ever heard a complaint by someone who’s worth many millions of dollars that too many people are getting food stamps? The amount that his taxes are affected by the cost of the food stamp program is infinitesimal and it has no impact on his life. It doesn’t affect his happiness or the quality of his life in any way, but nevertheless he’s upset about the perceived unfairness of those other “unworthy” people getting free food.
Why? Because the Other Wallet Worrier thinks it’s unfair. Not unfair to him, but unfair in some general “The world shouldn’t work like that” way.
The Other Wallet Worrier sees those unworthy people getting free food as a perversion of what he thinks should be the natural order of things.
The Moral Code Of The Other Wallet Worrier
The Other Wallet Worrier sets himself up as the judge of what other people deserve, and when someone gets something the Other Wallet Worrier thinks they don’t deserve the Other Wallet Worrier sees it as an attack on how he thinks the world ought to work.
Other Wallet Worriers believe that “bad guys” should suffer and that “good guys” should prosper, and they think that poor people are, if not the bad guys, at least the worthless guys.
So, when they see the worthless, loser-guys getting the same stuff, or worse, better stuff, for free than they got through hard work, it’s an affront to their authority as the arbiter of who deserves what and it’s an attack on their moral code of how they think the world should operate.
They’re thinking: I worked so hard for what I’ve gotten and now that bozo just snaps his fingers and he gets for free what I worked so hard to earn. That’s not fair. He shouldn’t have that.
How Criminals Think
That’s also exactly how criminals think. When a criminal sees a rich guy in a nice car he thinks:
Why does that jerk have that nice car? I never had a nice home. I never had anyone help me. I never got any breaks in life. My dad was drunk. My teachers all hated me. Nobody ever gave me anything. And this guy gets everything handed to him. Nice house. Rich parents. Fancy job. Look at him driving that Mercedes. That should be my Mercedes. With the crappy life I had, I deserve that car. That should be my car!
And that’s how he justifies stealing the car.
What does all this have to do with conservatives and poor people?
Lots of Conservatives Are Other Wallet Worriers
Talk to a conservative about poor people and there’s a good chance that they will tell you how stupid poor people are; how it’s a wonder that they’re able to dress themselves and manage to even get to work on time; how they don’t plan ahead; how they have no common sense; how they don’t work hard; how they waste their money.
They will tell you that a poor person’s poverty results from their stupidity, their lack of common sense, and their poor life choices. If pressed they will admit that they think poor people’s failings mean that they deserve to be poor.
Conservatives will give you all kinds of reasons for hating the idea of the minimum wage being set at a living wage, but underneath all of them is their emotional, moral conviction that poor people just don’t deserve to be paid that much money, that they don’t deserve to earn a living wage, and, if they say what they’re really thinking, the conservative will tell you that it’s unfair/wrong for them to be paid more than their crappy labor is really worth.
If you get a conservative talking about people who are living on food stamps or in Section 8 housing or getting Medicaid they’ll tell you how they’re lazy and drug addicts and stupid, that if they would only apply themselves, make smarter decisions, work harder, in short, if they would only choose to be more like the conservatives themselves, then they would have plenty of money.
But no, they’re lazy, stupid losers. They don’t deserve fifteen dollars an hour. They don’t deserve medical insurance. They’re just not good enough to earn that much, and they shouldn’t be paid more than their labor is worth.
It doesn’t matter that the conservative you’re talking to doesn’t eat at fast food joints that hire minimum-wage workers. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t run a business that employs minimum-wage workers.
The conservatives’ unhappiness is primarily based on their moral notion that these are loser people who don’t deserve to be paid that much money.
They oppose a living wage primarily as moral issue — that a living wage pays more money to people than they deserve and that it’s morally wrong for them to get more money than they deserve, especially when the successful people have had to work so hard for what they’ve gotten in life.
It won’t take long for many if not most conservatives to reveal that they are Other Wallet Worriers.
But Isn’t Their Concern About Their Wallets Too?
The Other Wallet Worriers will argue that a living-wage minimum wage will take money out of their wallets too. But that’s not really what their objection is all about.
If you do the numbers, raising the hourly wage of a fast food worker from $10/hour to $15/hour will increase the cost of a $.99 burger to about $1.13. That’s hardly a material impact on anyone.
But even more important is the savings that will flow from a living-wage minimum wage.
The federal government spends about $150 billion/year on food stamps and Section 8 housing. A minimum wage that is a living wage would greatly reduce the number of people who would qualify for those programs with a consequent tax savings.
Moreover, increasing the take-home of tens of millions of workers by 50% would provide a huge benefit to the economy resulting fewer people on government programs, more sales by businesses and more tax revenues.
Taken together, the reduction in federal welfare costs plus the increase in business-related tax revenues would far overbalance the relatively small increase in the cost of products primarily produced by minimum-wage workers.
So, no, the heart of the Other Wallet Worriers’ opposition to a living wage isn’t based on economic self interest.
The Second Part Of The Other Wallet Worrier’s Philosophy
Deep down, these Other-Wallet-Worrier conservatives have the idea that if poverty causes these lazy, stupid people to suffer enough, that
- They will choose to become more intelligent;
- Deprivation and hardship will motivate them to become more talented;
- Poverty can punish them into having the more valuable abilities, the better personalities, and the enhanced life skills that will make them deserving of a higher wage;
- The punishment of low pay, no medical care, and not enough food will either force them to become the smarter, more talented people who will deserve higher pay or they will continue to suffer the deprivations that their choice of stupidity, lack of talent, poor life skills entitles them to endure.
The conservatives who view the world through this moral lens believe that:
- These low-wage losers should suffer from not having enough money because that’s what they deserve;
- When stupid people are given things they don’t deserve, like a living wage that’s more than they’re worth, then you’re rewarding stupidity instead of punishing it.
- That if you punish stupidity and reward intelligence then people will stop choosing to be stupid and instead they will choose to be smart.
- That if poor people continue to refuse to choose to be smart or talented that then they deserve to suffer the consequences of poverty.
- That paying losers a living wage, giving them more money than they deserve, short circuits this entire moral system.
People Can’t Have More Common Sense Just By Wanting It
Of course,
- Stupidity and lack of talent are not choices.
- You can’t voluntarily become smarter, more clever, more talented, or have more common sense no matter how badly you wish you could.
But we’re not talking about rational judgments here. We’re talking about emotions and subjective ideas of right and wrong.
In the Other Wallet Worrier’s world
- Lack of training, talent, common sense or intelligence are voluntary choices.
- Living-wage jobs are available for everyone who is willing to choose to be smart and work hard.
- If you don’t have a living-wage job it’s because you chose to be stupid and not work hard;
- If you’re poor, untrained, and stupid you deserve to suffer because that was your choice.
Therefore, they believe that poor people shouldn’t get a living wage .
The Other Wallet Worriers take pleasure in seeing poor people experience the pain of poverty because it means that those loser people are getting what they deserve and because they believe that their suffering may motivate them to be smarter.
How dare someone try to short-circuit their moral system by insisting that every dumb-ass, moron, loser be paid enough money to live on when the poor quality of their labor doesn’t entitle them to be paid that much money!
If you point out that following this moral code results in millions of people having no access to medical care, they don’t care.
If you point out that following this moral code results in millions of people having to feed their children from food banks, they don’t care.
If you point out that following this moral code results in millions of people being unable to afford to train their children to themselves qualify for a decent paying job, they don’t care.
What a truly ethical and Christian moral code.
It’s Not About Logic
You’re never going to argue the Other Wallet Worriers out of their opposition to a living-wage minimum wage because the very bedrock reason for their opposition to it is rooted in their moral code, in their insistence on their right to decide what should be in other people’s wallets, and in that department they’ve found poor people to be wanting.
–David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
