If someone really is incapable of producing more than 8 bucks an hour, and doesn’t have family or friends to give them a black market job, I’d rather not have him in the workplace. I just don’t want to see the guy. So, put him on welfare? Well that would be OK if we shipped everyone on welfare to the ghetto and forbade them to vote and gave them a hard time should they wander out of the ghetto, or gave them amphetamines and made them dig makework tunnels in the mountains. What do you want to do with him? If you are against the libertarian solution, need another solution.

It isn't a conspiracy, but what Moldbug describes as distributed Machiavellianism. Also, it is telling that you chose as examples the Amish and Hasidic Jews. Tight-knit, ossified religious communities are able to withstand social engineering, but they are a small minority of Westerners.

All societies have people like this, the West has a lot more due to a combination of third world immigration and material abundance. The Christian values adds to the problem. What to do with them? There is only two thing to do, you either put them in welfare or you put them to work. I think putting them to work is the better solution. It reduces the free time on their hands and puts more pressure on their lives. They commit less crime and reproduce less. I think that is an outcome that we all are striving for, no?

Create something like the old Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps but make it an auxiliary branch of the USMC so they don't go around starting fires and other mischief. Similar to the Japanese solution. Anyone who gets eaten by a grizzly bear is a bonus.

"Anyone who has been in business for any amount of time knows that wages, like any other prices, have nothing to do with productivity or cost. " " If someone really is incapable of producing more than 8 bucks an hour," ... sigh

"2-Being part of a tribe/thede/country which is so fucking awesome that poverty doesn’t exist because we take care of everyone! " This is what leads civilizations to destruction. The history of the past is periods where heavy genetic selection results in a superior group of people. This group then conquers, kills, and enslaves all the groups around them (Mongols, Bantu, Romans, Chinese, ect). Eventually that civilization softens and picks option 2. The society is then eventually overwhelmed by worthless people at every level. It then either dies or enters periods of extreme genetic cleansing that restores the stock. Worthless people are not just the under class either. The upper and middle classes produces a lot of worthless people as well. It's just easier to push those people into the under class than to worry about eliminating them.

Suppose we have a minimum wage. But some people are not worth that, perhaps because they are stupid and lazy, perhaps because they are feckless, dishonest and destructive, and therefore need a lot of expensive supervision So, what do you do with those people? If you subsidize them, you get the problem we have now, which is that you get more of what you subsidize, and less of what you tax..

Is it even possible for a high technology human society to sustain itself in a meaningful way, or will the cognitive biases of people always result in societal suicide? We know that people prefer pretty lies to truth. Presumably this was just as true in the past as it is today. So why is our society so uniquely stupid? Is it that technology has sufficiently insulated us from the short-term consequences of societal stupidity? That seems to me the only logical explanation, in which case it is a problem that will solve itself when the long term consequence of collapse is finally realized.

In the early nineteenth century, the law on marriage was pretty much new testament: Punitive divorce for female adultery, but not necessarily for male adultery. Husband is head of the household, etc. However, the marriage of George the fourth and Queen Caroline demonstrates that the actual practice was something much closer to the modern system where the husband is responsible for everything but has power over nothing. People stretched their quite sensible laws to accommodate practices that were distinctly twenty first century feminist. However, if we go back just a few decades earlier, they did not. So, cultural change, caused by the struggle for political power.

Social cohesion is a public good. Back when conservatives were conservatives and not globalist vultures feasting on the corpse of what others built they understood that social cohesion requires full employment. "The devil makes work for idle hands" may be folksy but it's also true, figuratively at least.

on-topic You're right, people are tribal and that's why homogenous countries like minimum wages - similarly healthcare. Diversity turns society into lots of mini-tribes and kills that motivation except among leftists who like increased state power for its own sake, idealists who see everyone as the same tribe and those who will personally get more out than they pay in *and* people in countries which are being wrecked by their ruling elite and who therefore feel very insecure about the future - so a pretty big majority.

"Empowering women had been part of the Puritan schtick from the beginning" Empowering women (up to a point) is neccessary for assortative mating.