Episode 35. A Political Argument

Show Notes

This one went straight off topic. It started out as a rant but quickly became a debate about things as far ranging as the minimum wage, personal responsibility, and what Scott calls a culture of entitlement.

Minimum Wage

• Scott’s position was that raising the minimum wage when people currently aren’t doing their job wasn’t going to solve anything.
• Mike’s position was that the role of a minimum wage isn’t to support people who don’t need it; it’s to ensure that those who do need it (because they need to support themselves, and potentially a child, and potentially they need to do so in an area with a high cost of living) aren’t left out.
• Mike acknowledged that small businesses do find it hard to pay workers above a certain threshold, but to him that’s about there being a lack of infrastructure and a lack of help for smaller businesses who are just getting started, while larger corporations benefit insanely from economies of scale, yet tend to pay disproportionately fewer taxes.
• Kevin agrees that the minimum wage should be raised.

Mike’s Liberal Mindset

• Scott wanted to “challenge Mike on his liberal mindset.”
• Mike acknowledged he is totally a bleeding heart liberal.
• Mike doesn’t think all corporations are by definition evil, but the problem is that, currently, society is such that they’re allowed to be evil.
• Scott thinks we have an entitlement culture, based on his experiences with service industries. Mike’s response was, sure, plenty of people are terrible at their jobs… but that happens at all levels of society, and it is not an argument against dealing with the insane amounts of wealth inequality in North America.