Let me pick up the thread by acknowledging a major difference between slavery and the minimum wage — namely, the fact that the wage earner keeps the profit from his or her own labor.  In slavery, the seller takes some of the value at the time of purchase and the owner takes the rest over time.

Objectively, that may not be as big a distinction as it at first appears.  One supposes that some enterprising slaveholders in history discovered that they received better work when their slaves were well cared for, which could be seen as a form of bartering, without the middle step of cash.

Still, the core beliefs and logic with which we approach a topic will affect the sorts of solutions we propose when we find the system requiring correction.  In that context, I’d suggest that the progressive mindset puts low-income people in the same box as their intellectual predecessors once put slaves.

The reason — more explicit with a “living wage” — is that a minimum wage is set as the minimum value of a human being’s time, not as the minimum price of the task that he or she performs.  Somebody other than the worker is setting that price, and the worker is not permitted to determine that he or she is willing to perform the task more cheaply.

Those acting with cynical political motivation are essentially selling the human agency of low-income workers for the profit of votes.  Those of a more charitable bent receive their profit as good moral feeling.

This presumption has practical, actual economic effects, and I think it follows naturally that policies that aren’t correctly ordered toward human fulfillment will inevitably produce bad outcomes.

However, my point is that we come up with a much different prescription if we recognize human beings as the source of value in the economy, with the autonomy to determine their own priorities for their “kinetic” economic energy as well as the degree to and manner in which they unlock their own potential.