Baalzamon said: They immediately get on the defensive and act like you are taking their entire life away, because they are under the assumption that now a minimum requirement in life is having X Y and Z and being able to do A B and C. Ironically, it is often the very people who are struggling who come up with this arbitrary idea of what is a minimum requirement in life, when really it is much much lower. |
You keep bringing up this idea of "minimum requirement in life", and I'm not really sure what you mean. It sounds like you are talking about the money that would be necessary to not be dead, and yes, that number is often fairly low. Even people in poverty spend their money on things that aren't essential to living. However, as many other have brought up, living in poverty is also very much mentally taxing. You have to account for the fact that money which you seem to think is wasted or frivolous, is often being used to help a person's mental health. If someone is living in poverty and buying a video game console and a TV, they are not just frivolously throwing away money on something that isn't a necessity, they are spending my money on something which allows them to escape and relax, which may give them the willpower and sanity to continue working a job that they hate.
Does the fact that an individual spent some money on a console mean that the cost of living isn't too high relative to wages? Of course not. This shouldn't even be a part of the conversation, because under this line of logic, there is no such thing as economic injustice as long as the workers are alive (more or less). Obviously, this is faulty reasoning. As previously stated, income inequality should be examined not through looking at whether a low level worker owns a TV, but whether their pay is what would be expected in a just economy. When a company is making billions of dollars as one of the most successful companies in the world, they probably shouldn't be paying their workers minimum wage as they kill themselves over doing physical labor at an inhuman pace.
Again, income inequality is a symptom of economic injustice, and it is not something that can be defended by saying "Well, the poor own TVs".