A speaker uses a thought experiment about slave maintenance costs to argue that minimum wage today merely covers what slavery's upkeep did. He calculates food, housing, medical care, and security, concluding modern low-wage work amounts to generalized slavery for everyone.
Good evening, everyone. Today I'm here to talk to you about slavery. I'm going to give you a little demonstration that will help you visualize the kind of world we live in. So, for the purposes of this demonstration, imagine that you're a landowner or an industrialist. You have a large piece of land. You grow corn, cotton, whatever you want, or you have factories, whatever, you're an industrialist or an operator of something. And then for the purposes of this demonstration, we're going to say that you're a slave owner. We're going to assume that you're a slave owner. And in fact we're going to provide you with slaves. That means that I'm going to tell you, okay, here I am. I'm going to provide you with 500 slaves who are going to do the work for you for free. Excellent. No, no, let's assume that for the purposes of this demonstration, you're a slave owner. And in fact, one morning I'm going to show up with dozens of buses full of people and I'm going to deliver 500 slaves to you. There you go. At 7am the slaves are there at the entrance to the factory or at the entrance to the field, it doesn't matter. Then I tell you, here they are, your slaves. They're going to work for you for free. Excellent. Great. So you're going to be able to put all the money you earn in your pocket. You're going to have a cost price of almost zero and then have a profit of 100%. We'll see what happens. Well, the problem with slaves, you're going to see it very quickly. In fact, on the first day you're going to see it. It's true that you don't pay them, but on the other hand, you force them to work. That's true, but on our side, we're going to have to feed them work and you have to feed them, because if you don't feed them, they, they're going to starve to death. And then after three days, well, there's no one left to take care of your field. So you have to feed them. It's not free. You have to feed 500 people every day. It's not easy. Okay, uh, you have to house them. At the end of the day, you have to house them. Then you have to house 500 people. House them, launder them, as they say. And of course, when one of them is sick, you have to treat them, because if you don't treat them well, your production capacity will decrease. And then sooner or later, well, you can't work anymore, you can't exploit or produce anymore. What will you have to do? You will also have to, since you are forcing them to work well, you will have to hire security guards who will watch them, who will make sure that when one of them runs away, well, you have to go and catch them, bring them back, and then make an example of them and all that. And that's not free either. These are guys who are going to take your money, who are going to take your money every day and so on. Even worse, when there is a dip in the economy, for example, suddenly, well, there is a storm that has ravaged your entire operation, Your entire operation. And then. Or we are living in difficult times where your product is not selling, your factory is producing something that is not selling well, you are still a little bothered because you still have your 500 slaves who have. Who are going to cause fixed costs that you are going to have to pay every day, when in fact, we may not have needed to sell these slaves. But the problem is that probably the problems you are having, well, the neighbors have noticed them too. And if you want to sell to slaves, there are plenty of them who will sell their slaves on the market. It is possible that they will not sell or they will sell very badly. Then the day you need them, well, you'll have to go and buy them back at a high price. So what I'm trying to tell you is that one of the fundamental concepts of slavery is that it's not free. Many people say, oh, no, slavery, no, no, the slave is not free. The slave, if you take. On top of that, I'm not talking about it. If, when the slave is old and can no longer work, you pretend that you're not going to kill him anyway, so you're obliged to take care of him until the end of his life. In fact, one day you're going to meet other exploiters, other bosses and all that, and then you're going to do the math, okay, let's say over 12 months, over the rolling 12 months, how much did our slave cost us, let's say, per month? Let's try to do the math. The math. It costs time to feed, it costs time to house, and so on. And in fact, when you do the math, you're going to discover something absolutely extraordinary. You're going to discover that the slave costs you about, I mean, about a little bit of things ready. A little more or a little less, depending. It costs you the minimum wage. That's the price that the slave costs you, costs the minimum wage. So instead of bothering yourself, especially during off peak periods, you are still obliged to pay this minimum wage to each person. In other words, pay this minimum wage for each person. When nothing is produced, well, you do something much simpler. You make an arrangement between the bosses and you tell your, listen, you're free, go anyway. You know very well that they're not going to get very far. You know very well that in any case, uh, they're dependent on you in some way. So they're going to come to work and then the money that you spent on them, you spent on their maintenance. But you actually give it to them. You pay them. In fact, in this sense, from this perspective, the minimum wage is not even a salary for a job. The minimum wage is just what the slave would have cost if he were fully supported by the boss. So the boss gives him the money that he would have spent on him anyway. But the work is free. The work is not paid. The minimum wage does not pay for the work. It just covers the boss's expenses. There you have it. And then that's why in the United States, for example, they let the slaves leave the fields. They freed them. Because in fact, the slavery model was so, so good. It just needed a little, a little improvement in the sense that instead of enslaving only blacks, they're going to enslave the whole of society. They're going to enslave both whites and blacks. And then always this new thing, you know, we always call things bi. We always give them a name that sounds the opposite of what it really is. For example, Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize winner. He is not a Nobel Prize winner for war, which does not exist, even though he has launched many wars and all that. In fact, all the things, all the words are reversed. And we say we are going to free the slaves. We are creating a great liberation of slaves. In fact, we are not freeing the slaves, not at all. We are just putting the whole society under slavery because this model extends it and puts everyone in it. So there you have it. We live in a slave society regardless of gender, skin color or anything else. Okay with that, I will leave you and I wish you a great weekend if you can, mister.
