To see in the reduction of the labor cost of the lowest-paid employees more advantages than drawbacks is one of the expedients that delay the adoption of three reforms that are, by contrast, fundamentally sound and coherent:
Full wage exchange proceeds from the same spirit as full shareholder exchange. Both advance toward greater objectivity of final prices (those at which enterprises sell to their customers) while reducing abuses of power. The population and, through it, the markets arbitrate with better-informed judgment. Society is the better for it.
The currents of economic analysis that are classic today (the most widely taught) have turned attention away from primordial truths. One of the most important is that, country by country, and even in certain nations region by region, the total labor income is subject to a distribution:
The exercise of this prerogative, through periodic negotiations in which no one any longer denies that the highest labor remunerations reduce those below them, makes it contradictory and counterproductive to rely on redistribution to correct distribution. Where the latter still appears, or once again appears, poorly regulated, it is the regulation of distribution (currently called primary by econometricians) that should be revised first.
A people that has become aware of all the principal prerogatives that the system of plenary economic exchanges confers on it learns to put them to use in favor of its interests, which are not those of an oligarchy, nor of a bureaucracy, nor of any socio-professional category. The principle of taxation proportional to the taxpayer’s income contravenes Article XIII of the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 only in the light of the erroneous theorizations of income distribution, both general (placement vs. labor) and specific to labor income.