Raising wages is morally, fiscally right

Raising the minimum wage is a no-brainer.

If the solvency of a business depends on hiring people at a wage that a person cannot live on then it is not a viable business. Of course societies have ignored this for centuries. It's simply amazing what can be done with slave labor as long as there is the absence of moral character necessary to engage in the use of it.

Deriving one's income and wealth from the accumulation of a percentage of other people's productivity has certainly been an effective model for the people who use it. But is it just? And more importantly, is it a functional model in the long run? It seems we are constantly at war. Most wars boil down to economic disparity. Disparity can last for a long time. But it always ends in war.

Income disparity along with overpopulation are the issues of our time. Statistics vary, but a recent Harvard study on income distribution established the current ratio of CEO to worker pay at 354 to 1.

I'm sorry but our friendly neighborhood CEO is not 354 times more productive than his workers. As a small business owner I know that I am not 354 times more productive than the people working for me. And in a small business this kind of disparity rarely if ever occurs. That's because it can't. There aren't enough workers involved. The only way you can get this kind of lopsided distribution is when one person is accumulating the productivity of a whole bunch of people. That's a snapshot of corporate America.

The right to the fruit of one's labor is a pretty time-honored American concept. But we have snudged this concept into acceptance of the accumulation of the fruit of other people's labor as if it were our own. This is the lie upon which income disparity has been built. And it's a relatively harmless lie on a small scale. But as the scale deepens, so does the harm.

The will to address this issue is utterly lacking in our legislatures at all levels. This is a reflection of our own uncertainty about the issue. It will change when we change. And then we will change who is in those legislatures. Until we do address it, we are on an inevitable and most unfortunate historical trajectory.

Steve Bruno is vice chair of the Kootenai County Democratic Party.