I like “just start your own business!” I had a small business that did well enough that I was able to run it for 10 years and only stopped out of choice. I now have a relatively low-paying job with someone else and I am more financially secure now than I was during any of those 10 years.

But the same people that think we can simple jack up no-skill job wages to $15, 20, 30/hr think that all business owners are bazillionaires who can easily afford the more expensive wages.

That was also the running theme in subs (on Reddit) when it came to landlords - they were all evil billionaires just looking to screw over their tenants.

Nope. I am one of those people. If you can’t afford to pay employees a livable wage, you shouldn’t be running a business. I had no employees, in part because I couldn’t afford to pay an assistant a wage I felt they deserved. People don’t deserve to suffer just so you can get The Burger Hole off the ground.

No one is talking about “suffering” FFS. But a no-skill job is still a no-skill job. Get a marketable skill and there is plenty of money out there.

All jobs are skilled jobs.

Post WW2 a lot of stock was put in scientism in industrial nad manufacturing jobs, which has led to the rise of new public management, cementing the dissolution of the bond between identity and job. The basic principle is that everything can be quantified and measured, and that every step carried out by a master craftsman can be exactly described and distributed. The replacement of actual manufacturing with the menial task of carrying out a single, repeatable step hour after hour after hour, day after day. Like a robot.

That’s the death of skilled jobs, and it’s driving the collapse of the uneducated man, according to Richard Reeves among others. A shift towards cognitive work instead of labor has taken place, and a lot of the jobs that previously carried a large segment of the lower strata has simply moved to asia and lower wage countries.