Raise the minimum wage to $1000/sec!

LET'S RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE TO $1000/sec!!!!

Amusingly, I sat down and decided to really analyze it once when someone sarcastically said, "If it's so great to raise the minimum wage to $18 or $22 an hour, why not $30, $40, or $50?" So I really sat down and thought it over... and the picture was a lot less dire than they seemed to think it would be.

Although I'm not necessarily advocating it, here's what it'd look like if we raised the minimum... let's go crazy here... to $1000 dollars per second. On top of that, let's tie that number to inflation, so if inflation goes up, so does the number, so there's no "inflating until it acts just like things do now just with more following zeroes."

Well, first off, Big business will collapse under that strain. Not even they could take that. Sure, a few could hire people for awhile, and there's a few that could make it that are really profitable per man-hour worked (I'm looking at you, Mojang and professional sports!) Now, that said... corporations collapse. No dodging that one. (Side note, this also means no more corporate lobbying, very limited corporate propaganda, etc.) Effectively, there's some rich shareholders, but their start losing money fast if they try to hold on to their power, which they won't because they like their money, which means all stockholders cash out post haste. This results in a completely crashed stock market from which there is no recovery. Those who have money try to flee the country to salvage their finances... but guess what? The airlines aren't able to afford their people and their pilots to their private jets will make out like bandits (enough for those pilots to buy their own planes... keep that in mind, this is where it starts to get fun).

The outflux from the major corporations and their shareholders as they scramble to leave would dump decades worth of wages in a matter of minutes. All of a sudden these pilots can buy their own private jet, and instead of making decent wages, all of a sudden can be self employed with no loans. At first, these pilots are going to really be able to live it up. (There will be lots of other jobs that will get a similar situation.)

And yes... the small mom & pop places with a dozen employees will collapse. Poof, they're gone too.... or are they?
Their employees are gone, yes... but the mom & pop? They're still around. They own the place. It'd be silly for them to try and pay themselves. They do have to shrink the store a bit though. Maybe cut back to a tenth of what it was. But... all of a sudden... they have customers. Why? Because who else are people going to buy from? The corporation that doesn't exist anymore? So, husband and wife, no more employees, are all of a sudden having more customers than they can handle because literally 100% of the population is coming to them instead of Wal-Mart. They can charge hand over fist for their food... until one of their previous employees is sitting there thinking, "Hey, I know all the steps on how to run that... I'm going to start my own food place." Sure, he'll never grow to having employees, but D#$* he gets more bang for his effort than he used too.

And this would be mirrored everywhere. Every business becomes a sole proprietorship without employees. Nobody's becoming billionaires or even millionaires at this point (except for those who are really good at automating everything).. but, everyone gets to work the hours they want, every mom & pop is getting enough customers to keep itself afloat, everyone's their own boss, and how much money you make is purely dependent on your own smarts and dedication.

At this point, laws are no longer being lobbied to benefit the rich and the powerful. In fact, it goes back that instead of being poor compared to the lobbyists and corporate leaders, the wealthiest position is politician.... and the only way to get there now is pleasing the greatest number of people, not kissing up to corporations (there are no corporations to kiss up to anymore, remember?) So all of a sudden, politicians have to work for the people. There goes about half of the glut in the government right there (subsidies to corporations? What corporations?) The economy flip-flops from a top-down system ruled by wall-street and the megacorp but into a bottom-up system ruled by the average person who's pulling his own weight.

This also leads to another thing... so many different intellectual properties are owned by corporations. Whatever doesn't get sold in the wake of the collapse, all of a sudden becomes public domain. GE, BP, and many other companies had been buying up competing technologies and never making them. It's actually been a pretty standard tactic in corporations for some time now... they don't want to have rework their system to handle new ideas, but they don't want someone else disrupting their market. They have the patents to extremely efficient cars, so with them gone, and the patents entering public domain, that means that car enthusiasts can start putting together and building those cars.... oh, and by the way, remember when I mentioned automation? Those factories will still be sitting there. Some of the richer people will buy those factories at bottom dollar. They can't hire employees, but they can automate at least parts of the process. Maybe not the entire process, but enough to be able to sell some larger parts. Then, before dealers, a new business will spring up... those who buy car sections from various sellers, and complete the task of putting it together, then they sell the car to the dealer (See what happened? All of a sudden the "grunt" factory worker is his own business, making respectable income for his work... getting profit from each car made). All of a sudden, you're seeing cars hitting pavement that are getting 80 miles to the gallon without any corporate stupidity blocking it, not to mention high efficiency electric cars that have been previously blocked.

So, to answer... raise minimum wage to $1000/second.... and, surprisingly, the world doesn't look worse in many regards, just different.