Contrary to what most fair-minded people think, there is a place in our society for politicians who abuse their power or are more self serving than they ought to be; that place is with others who violate the rights of the People and cannot conform to societal norms, i.e. in prison. As if our prisons were not already overcrowded! In the not-too-distant past the prisons of America were working farms. A return to that method of "rehabilitation" might not be such a bad idea. Here is an example of how such a system could be made to work:
Every prisoner in amerika should be given a job to do while serving their sentence and they should be paid for the work they do. Furthermore, the prison system should be made to not only pay for itself, but to turn a profit as well. Inmates who are working, whether in the fields or in the prison laundry, library or infirmary, should be made to pay rent for their accommodations. A private cell should cost more than an open cell block of bunks, for example. Those who refuse to work should be treated the same in jail as they would be treated "on the outside." That is to say that they should be evicted! Not out of the prison and into the streets, but out into the yard, to sleep outdoors and go without meals until and unless they are able to pay their own way. It is ludicrous that we have a prison system in this country where life inside a prison is often "easier" than in the streets of our cities. Life within the penal system should be made more like "real life" on the outside! Even politicians should find a jail term in which they would be made to earn their keep a greater deterrent than the free room and board that most career criminals now see when they look at our prison system.
Ever since the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, modern society has been run on what economists call "sustenance wages." The concept is for employers to pay their workers no more than it costs those workers to pay for their food and lodging. If, gods forbid, the workers were able to afford luxuries or, even worse, save enough money to go into business for themselves (or stop working altogether!) the fabric of which our society is woven would rapidly disintegrate. Or so many employers would have us believe.
Minimum wage laws had to be enacted in this country in order to prevent business owners from paying their workers less than the actual cost of their basic needs, and the minimum wage law has needed to be amended many times since its inception in order to keep pace with inflation. The need for such a mandated guideline, and the need to update that guideline regularly, is the worst conceivable indictment against our present economic system. There is no need for (wo)men to be worked to death when there are so many people standing in line all day at the unemployment office. There is no justification for workers to take home sustenance wages when their employers are squandering enormous sums of money on luxury items. We have see that Marxist socialism is not a viable form of government, but we have also seen many a bloody example of what happens when too great a disparity exists between the classes of a society. Employers who pay only minimum wage should be boycotted at the least and put out of business at most. We do not need minimum wages in amerika, we need fair and equitable wages! If there is one place that sustenance wages should be allowed, then there is only one; it is within the penal system.