It’s not selling your soul to master some trade or find a niche where you can earn a better living than minimum wage. Well over 80% of the workforce, and maybe over 90%, has got there. The other 10 or 20 percent include a lot of temporarily-minimum-wage types like the younger me who will move up by and by.

Those who fall in the remaining 5 percent or so who just aren’t going to earn more than the minimum wage, well, they may be good people. A few may be saints. Sneering at them for “being losers” is no more fair than it would be for the 1 percent to sneer at all of the rest of us for being losers, nor than for the very few to sneer at the one percent for being losers. Everybody’s a winner just for being in America and in this century, in the grand scheme of things, and everybody’s a loser by comparison to somebody else somewhere and on some scale. But if we line people up by incomes, and limit discussion to the US, and separate everybody into “winners” and “losers”, then most of the “winners” are good old ordinary people with some extra energy or skill or courage or stamina, and most of the “losers” are good old ordinary people with a little less energy or skill or courage or stamina. And most of these still make more than the minimum wage.