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I BelieveGovernance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast Author: Joel K. Douglas
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The Price Is the Price
Monday, 27 April, 2026
Gravel lot. Friday morning in Torrington. The trailers are lined up in neat rows at the front, goosenecks and bumper-pulls together, dust still settling from the last one in. He pulls in at the end of the row and steps down from the cab. October cold. His breath hangs in the air and catches the low sun.He only comes on Fridays. The bakery is only open Thursday through Saturday, and there’s no sale at the market on Thursday or Saturday, so Friday it is. Sale at ten. Bakery by noon. Home by four.The brand inspector’s office is off to the left of the building. Proof of ownership for cattlemen who run stock on shared grazing land. A man there in a Carhartt and a good hat, checking papers, making sure nobody’s selling another man’s livelihood. The inspector nods. He nods back. They have known each other a long time.He walks in through the front door. The pay window is right there, three ladies behind it who will take his money if he buys and cut him a check if he sells. They know him too. One of them smiles. He touches the brim of his hat.Through the door to the arena. Tall stairs up to the bleachers. The seats are bench-style, worn smooth by forty years of men in Wranglers. Coffee in styrofoam. Diesel, manure, pine shavings. The smell is the same smell his father knew.A heeler mix trots up the aisle. Red with a bad left ear. She sniffs his boot and moves on. Somebody in the third row has a hot dog from concessions and the dog knows it.The auctioneer is already going. The chant. Workers below move the cattle through the arena, through the pens, out to the holding lots behind the building. From a walkway above you can watch the whole thing. The ring, the pens, the loading chutes, the vet’s shop in the back where the doc is never sitting still.His turn comes. Thirty steers out of the gooseneck that morning. Six-weight, good feed. He’ll come back a couple more times for sales, because his truck can’t pull them all in one go. The gate opens and they come through in a knot, hooves on concrete, and a man with a flag moves them into the ring.Three buyers in the front row. One for a Colorado feedlot. One for Nebraska. One buying for an Oklahoma stocker that ships to Tyson. They don’t look up. The auctioneer starts. The chant rises. A nod. Another nod. A pause. The gavel falls.The price is the price. Set on the board in Chicago before his trailer left the ranch. His cattle are in the pen. He can’t refuse this price without losing money.He goes to the pay window. The lady he knows slides a check across the counter. He folds it and puts it in his shirt pocket and thanks her and touches his hat again.Out the front door. The gravel lot is still full. The sun is higher now. The brand inspector is still at his post. Four blocks to the bakery. He can’t pull his gooseneck over there. Nowhere to park it. It’s only a ten-minute walk even if you don’t hurry, and he doesn’t. Small town. Brick storefronts. The bakery is the one with the line. Tight space. Warm. When he opens the door he has to push through the line. Flour in the air. Crusty French sourdough stacked on the shelf behind the counter. A mostly empty tray of cinnamon crunch croissants, crusty outside and soft in the middle, and whole pies behind the glass when the baker feels like it.His wife wants a pie. Partly because she likes the treat. Partly because she wants the bakery to stay in business.He buys the pie. Apple, because that’s what they have. A cinnamon crunch croissant for the drive. Coffee in a paper cup.He eats the croissant in the window seat and watches the street. The check is folded in his shirt pocket. It’s a good check and a thin margin both, and he knows which one will matter by spring.Nobody at the sale barn asked about his costs. What he paid his ranch hand. What the diesel was.He finishes the coffee. Picks up the pie. Walks back to the truck the long way. The gravel crunches under his boots when he crosses the lot. The trailers are thinning out now. Some of the men who came in this morning are already gone.He loads up. Starts the truck. The pie rides in the passenger seat where his wife would sit.Four hours home. He has all afternoon to think about it.Act I. The Goal, Maths, and PatternsThe wage debate is asking the wrong question. What has to be true about the rest of the economy before a wage floor can do what its advocates claim?An Abraham Lincoln draft he wrote before taking his seat in Congress. “To secure to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.”Restated. A goal of good governance is that businesses pay workers a wage high enough that their neighbor doesn’t have to make up the difference for them to live.Jessica Tarlov and Scott Galloway make the case on their podcast Raging Moderates that America needs a twenty-five-dollar federal minimum wage. Galloway’s argument, developed over several years in his writing and in his 2024 TED talk, is that we’ve transferred America’s wealth from young to old over four decades, and raising the minimum wage is the most elegant tool to reverse it. Tarlov shares the position and carries it into the daily political conversation.Serious people making a serious argument. American workers are getting squeezed. The current federal minimum wage is a cruel joke. A country that can’t pay its workers enough to keep them off social programs is not the country it claims to be.I agree with them about the goal:If you work, your employer owes you enough money that your neighbor doesn’t have to give you extra money out of their pocket. A business that pays wages so low that the taxpayer has to fill the gap for you to heat your house and put food on the table isn’t a business standing on its own. It’s a business subsidized by every working American who files a tax return. The Lincoln standard, at minimum, is that the whole product of labor means the business pays for it, not the taxpayer.So let’s do some math.The federal Earned Income Tax Credit phases out for a single adult with no dependents at $19,104 in 2025. If that adult works a full-time job, that means 2,080 hours a year. Divide by 2,080 hours and you get $9.19 an hour. SNAP gross income for a single-person household tops out around $20,331, or $9.77 an hour. Medicaid in the forty states that expanded it under the Affordable Care Act cuts off for a childless adult at about $21,597, $10.38 an hour. Below these numbers, the single adult working full time is guaranteed to be on some form of federal assistance. The taxpayer is making up the difference.Call it ten dollars and some change, or even eleven. That is the subsistence floor for a working single adult with no dependents. It’s the wage below which the government takes money from your neighbor’s pocket to give it to you. The federal minimum wage today is $7.25. It hasn’t moved since 2009.Whatever else we argue about, no one should be allowed to pay less than the wage that keeps a working single adult off the programs designed to combat poverty. A business that cannot pay ten dollars an hour to a full-time adult worker is a business being subsidized by its neighbors, and neither party should defend that arrangement.Now run the same test the other direction. Twenty-five dollars an hour for a single adult with no dependents is $52,000 a year, well above every threshold in the hard welfare cluster. For that worker, twenty-five dollars is far more than self-sufficiency in large parts of the country. The neighbor is not making up the difference anymore. The wage has cleared the bar and then some.But twenty-five dollars isn’t enough for a family. The traditional American expectation is a family where one parent stays home with the children.The EITC threshold for a married couple with two children is $64,430. Divide by 2,080 hours and you get $30.98 an hour. That is the single-earner floor for a traditional family of four to get off the programs. For three kids, $33. One working parent has to earn over thirty dollars an hour to achieve self-sufficiency without taxpayer support. Twenty-five dollars isn’t enough.No politically viable national wage floor is enough.We have a systemic problem, and wages are only one part of it. We want passion. We want overt shows of strength.Strength is the dull, patient, unglamorous work of a Republic that understands the difference between strength and the appearance of strength.We saw this when the administration imposed tariffs on China and the rest of the world. The argument was that the tariffs would bring the factories back. We had hollowed out our domestic supply chains over forty years. They didn’t reappear when Washington wished them into being.We saw it with Iran. In June of 2025 we struck three nuclear facilities. Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz. Diplomacy held. The administration called it decisive. The administration got lucky. Eight months later, Iran made a different choice. On February 28 we struck again. Iran closed the Strait. Energy prices jumped. We had no Jones Act reform, no pipeline to California, no buffer in the fuel supply chain. The infrastructure we hadn’t built in June was still not built in February. The lesson is that we should not have acted without first building the domestic capacity that made the action decisive.Restoring economic security to America’s youth is the same. Twenty-five an hour is acting with passion, without the right infrastructure in place. Lifting a single-earner family of four to self-sufficiency is structural work that a wage floor cannot achieve.A twenty-five-dollar national minimum wage imposed tomorrow would land on an economy whose supply side is as broken as America’s oil chain and the factory base was when the tariffs hit. Housing supply is inadequate. We aren’t building starter homes. Four packers process eighty-five percent of American beef. We have no national focus on making workers more valuable to their businesses through improved training. Yes. Wages are too low. But so is supply.If all we do is raise wages, we’ve signaled more demand without adding supply. More demand for the same houses means higher prices. The wage increase moves to the housing market. The house the young couple could almost afford at the old price goes up to the point where they can’t afford it at the new price either. The welfare threshold climbs with the cost of living. People still need food on the table and heat in the house. We raised the wage. We moved nothing.The conservative instinct is to wait. Build the supply side first, let wages follow. That idea has merit and zero viability. Indefinitely pause the wage increase and the wage increase never comes. Businesses have a social responsibility to increase profits, not pay workers.The progressive instinct is to raise wages now and build later, or not at all. The single-earner family is no better off than before. The cost of living rises with it because nothing on the supply side has changed. The young family who couldn’t afford the house at the old price still can’t afford it at the new one. The welfare threshold climbs. The single-earner family is no better off than before, and in some places is worse off because the businesses that employed them closed.We have to kick-start both at the same time. Wages and housing. Antitrust. Trade. Input costs. One can’t wait on the other. Ideally the supply side runs slightly ahead so that young people who get a raise don’t watch it burn. The minimum wage we need is the wage that keeps a working single adult off social programs. Ten dollars and some change. Peg it to whichever welfare threshold is actually binding for a single adult, EITC, SNAP, or Medicaid, and let it adjust automatically as those thresholds move. Take the politics out of it. Couple the wage floor to the subsidy so the two cannot drift apart again.Then build three more pieces in parallel.Tax structure. Conditional tax relief for businesses that pay every worker above the social program threshold for that worker’s household. Reward the businesses whose employees don’t need public assistance. Stop subsidizing, through the tax code, the businesses whose employees do. This protects small and mid-sized businesses that could pay more but don’t have the revenue to absorb the cost today.Housing supply. Put housing goals into the Small Business Innovation Research grants at USDA and HUD to incentivize builders to build first-time homebuyer homes. Reform zoning to allow higher density and smaller lots. Permit timeline reform to cut the months between a contractor driving stakes in the ground and getting approval to build. Close the gap between wages and the cost of living by pulling the cost down, not by pushing the wage up past what the economy can absorb.Market structure. Antitrust enforcement in the concentrated industries where price-takers have no lever. An example is the four packers. Tyson, JBS, Cargill, National Beef. Give the rancher more buyers in the front row. Extend this to every sector where oligopoly has captured pricing power from producers and workers. Let producers pay higher wages from their own revenue rather than requiring subsidies to close the gap. The right question is: What has to be true about the rest of the economy before a wage floor can do what its advocates claim?Until we build that infrastructure, an increase in wages in isolation does more damage than good in the places that can least absorb it.Act II. The Sale BarnBack to Friday morning. Torrington. Gravel lot. Thirty steers out of the gooseneck. Three buyers in the front row who don’t look up.The price of live cattle on that Friday was set on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange the day before. The CME has been the reference board for American cattle since 1964. Before Chicago, the trail herds came up from Texas or out west to the Kansas railheads in Abilene, Dodge City, Ellsworth, and rode east in stock cars to the slaughterhouses at Kansas City and Chicago. The stockyards at both cities closed decades ago. The board did not. The cattle stopped going. The price still does.Four packers process eighty-five percent of American beef. Tyson. JBS. Cargill. National Beef. Derrell Peel at Oklahoma State, the livestock economist whose Monday market report is read by every serious rancher in the country, wrote for years about what that concentration does. The packer pays what the four corporations agree to pay. Every link upstream prices off that anchor. The rancher takes what’s left. He is a price-taker on every input cost and a price-taker on the only thing he sells.He drove four hours to Torrington past a closer sale barn in Buffalo. Buffalo has two buyers on a good day. Torrington has eight. He sorted his best-looking thirty black calves, same weight class, and judged that Torrington made more sense. More buyers in the front row means better price discovery. The four hours of diesel is what he pays to find out what his year is worth. That is the thin edge of his agency. He cannot raise his price. He can only choose which room to walk into.Now put a twenty-five-dollar national minimum wage on this economy.Three stops, descending pricing power.A hedge fund in Manhattan pays its receptionist twenty-five dollars an hour and doesn’t blink. Labor is two percent of revenue. The floor is a rounding error on the expense side.Pam owns a diner in Chillicothe, Missouri. She raises the chicken fried steak from fourteen dollars to seventeen. Some regulars stay, some don’t. She has a bad choice, but she has one. She survives. Limping.The rancher at the sale barn has a different story.His costs are already rising. The tariffs were supposed to bring the factories back. They landed on a supply chain that couldn’t absorb them. Fertilizer is up forty percent. Diesel is up. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. The deeper reason is that nine administrations since the 1973 oil embargo failed to build the infrastructure that would have buffered the shock. And a twenty-five-dollar wage would raise every one of those costs again, because every supplier has workers too, and every supplier can pass the wage through to him, and he cannot pass it to anyone. The kid who used to ride fence along the north line, where the Bighorns come down to meet the sage, can make twenty-five at the McDonald’s in town. None of that flows into the check the auctioneer writes on Friday morning.He could refuse the bid. In theory. In practice the cattle are in the pen. The fuel to haul them home costs what it costs. The pasture is short, so if he takes them home he has to pay to feed them, and they eat the hay he needs to feed the cattle still on the ranch. Winter is coming. The ranch needs the check. The price on the board is the price he gets, because every other option costs him more than it saves.That is what it means to be a price-taker. It is not the absence of choice. It is a choice between bad and worse, made before he ever left the ranch.So the twenty-five-dollar wage lands differently in each of the three places. The hedge fund in New York absorbs it. Pam adapts. The rancher exits. His ranch hand loses the job. The kid who would have learned to weld and pull calves takes the fast-food job. Six months later the ranch sells to a corporation that has deep pockets and no grandchildren. The community loses both. The families the wage was supposed to lift end up on the programs it was supposed to get them off, in a town that’s a little emptier than before.A wage increase with no supply adjustment might lift some workers at the bottom. It displaces the worker in the middle. It concentrates the damage on the people with the least pricing power in the economy.The rancher and his wife have three grown children. None of them live within three hours of the ranch.The oldest is in Denver. He works in IT. His wife teaches. They’ve been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save enough for a down payment, the prices move. The last house they looked at was three-hundred-twenty. The bank qualified them for two-ninety. They decided to wait another year.The middle one is in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse. Her husband works for the railroad. They have one child. They want three but can’t afford for either of them to take a year off. They decided to wait.The youngest is in Billings. Not married yet. Dating someone serious. He told his dad over Thanksgiving that he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to afford a ring.Three kids in three cities. The same story runs in every direction. The nurse in Pittsburgh waiting on the second child. The factory worker in Youngstown trying to qualify for a house. The teacher in Memphis who can’t afford to live in the district where she teaches.The rancher looks out across the south pasture and does the math he never thought he’d have to do. He owns the land. His father owned it. His grandfather homesteaded it. The ranch is the thing that made his family possible for three generations. The same ranch cannot, on its current terms, make his grandchildren possible.He can leave them the ranch. One of them might take it. More likely it gets sold when he and his wife are gone, because his children’s lives are no longer in the Bighorns, because the towns that would have held them couldn’t support the jobs or the houses or the childcare that would have kept them here.A twenty-five-dollar wage doesn’t fix any of that.But a conditional tax break for the ranch he earns by proving every worker he pays clears the social program thresholds might let him raise the kid’s wage to twenty-five dollars an hour without losing the ranch. Enough to match McDonald’s. Enough to keep the fence mended and the calves pulled and the ranch viable for more years. Maybe enough to give the youngest son a reason to consider coming home to run it, instead of staying in Billings trying to afford a ring.Antitrust enforcement on the four packers gives him eight buyers in the front row at Torrington instead of three. A hundred dollars more per head. Seventy-eight head across three trips a year. Eight thousand dollars he doesn’t have today. Enough margin for new equipment. Enough margin to hire the kid full-time. Maybe another reason for his son in Billings to come home.A federal challenge to build starter homes under a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the kind of thing the Small Business Innovation Research program was designed for, might put a house within reach of his oldest and his wife in Denver. Which might end the six-year wait. Which might give him another grandchild.The bridge would let the ranch and the bakery stay open long enough to pass to the next generation.The wage hike mandate lifts wages by a number that’s eaten by higher prices. The structural bridge would lift his family back into the life his grandfather built.Act III. The Long WallsA country that can’t build starter homes will not reform its tax code, break up its packers, and rebuild its housing market in the same legislative session. Not this year. Not next. Probably not in the decade it would take for the rancher’s grandchildren to be born.The policy is not the hard part. The country that could pass the policy is the hard part.That is not a reason to quit.Only a functional government could pass a twenty-five-dollar wage. Only a functional government could coordinate four structural reforms. We do not have a functional government.So the first work is not legislation. It is consensus. Dull, patient, unglamorous. An argument that enough Americans share eventually becomes unstoppable. Abolition took eighty years. The forty-hour week took seventy. Civil rights took a century. The Constitution itself took fifteen years of argument before it could be written at all. Each was won by people who understood that the work was longer than their lives, who did the work anyway.The wage debate is not a debate. It is the beginning of a conversation. This letter to Raging Moderates is an example of that conversation. I agree with them on the goal. I disagree with them on the mechanism. We are both working in the same direction. That is what a coalition looks like before there is a coalition.The consensus is national and local at the same time. It is built in forums like this one, and in bakeries that stay open because the rancher’s wife wants them to.The rancher in the Bighorns and the nurse in Pittsburgh and the teacher in Memphis don’t know that they share a problem. The work is to let them know. The slow accumulation of argument will eventually make the problem impossible to unsee.No bill will pass before enough Americans recognize their neighbor in the argument.Lincoln knew this. He spent the 1850s making the case against slavery, speech after speech, letter after letter, while the country caught up to what he was saying. By the time he took office, the argument was won. The war was the enforcement.Our work today is not the war. It is the 1850s.The bridge will not be built by the government we have. It will be built, slowly, by the country the argument makes possible.That country starts today, at every kitchen table where someone has the conversation with the person across from them.SourcesThe facts and figures in this piece are from the following. All were consulted directly; nothing has been paraphrased from secondary summaries. Anyone who wants to verify a claim can go to the original.Primary sourcesLincoln, Abraham. “Fragments of Notes regarding a Tariff Discussion,” 1846-1847. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln. The full text of the “whole product of his labour” passage. Also collected in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, Vol. I, pp. 407-416.Internal Revenue Service. “Publication 596 (2025), Earned Income Credit (EIC).” Authoritative source for the $19,104 single-filer threshold and the $64,430 married-with-two-children threshold.U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division. “Minimum Wage.” Confirms $7.25 federal minimum wage effective July 24, 2009.U.S. Department of Labor. “History of Changes to the Minimum Wage Law.” Full history of federal minimum wage rates since 1938.USDA Food and Nutrition Service. “SNAP Eligibility.” Federal SNAP income limits.U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “2025 Poverty Guidelines” (PDF). 138% of FPL for a single individual = $21,597.U.S. Office of the Historian, Department of State. “Oil Embargo, 1973-1974.” The foundational energy-policy event referenced in the piece.Congressional Research ServiceCongressional Research Service. “U.S. Strikes on Nuclear Sites in Iran” (IN12571). June 23, 2025. Official account of the June 2025 strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.Congressional Research Service. “Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities” (R45281). Updated March 2026.Meatpacker concentrationThe White House. “Trump Administration Cracks Down on Foreign-Owned Meat Packing Cartels.” November 7, 2025. Official statement confirming the “Big Four” meatpackers (JBS, Cargill, Tyson, National Beef) control 85% of the U.S. beef processing market, up from 36% in 1980.Farm Action. “Meatpacking: Four Corporations, Total Control.” Independent analysis of the Big Four’s 80-85% market control.Investigate Midwest. “Fact-checking Trump’s call for an investigation into meatpacking companies.” Verifies the 85%/36% concentration figures using USDA data.Cattle marketsCME Group. Livestock Futures. Official exchange page for live cattle (traded since 1964) and feeder cattle (traded since 1971) futures.Cambridge University Press. “Paper Steaks: Live Cattle Futures Markets and the Financial Revolution of 1964.”Enterprise & Society. Academic history of the CME’s launch of live cattle futures.Encyclopedia of Chicago. “Union Stock Yard.” Authoritative history of the Chicago stockyards, which closed August 1, 1971.Derrell S. Peel, Breedlove Professor of Agribusiness, Oklahoma State University. Faculty page and weekly Cow/Calf Corner market commentary.Medicaid and Social ProgramsKaiser Family Foundation. “Status of State Medicaid Expansion Decisions.” Confirms 40 states plus DC have expanded Medicaid; childless adults in expansion states qualify up to 138% FPL ($21,597 in 2025). Wyoming is a non-expansion state.Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The Earned Income Tax Credit.” Policy analysis of EITC structure and thresholds.Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “A Quick Guide to SNAP Eligibility and Benefits.” FY2026 SNAP income thresholds.Scott Galloway and Raging ModeratesGalloway, Scott. “How the US is destroying young people’s future.” TED 2024. Source of Galloway’s $25 minimum wage proposal and the “war on the young” framing.Galloway, Scott. “Doing the Minimum.” No Mercy / No Malice, September 13, 2024. Written version of the minimum-wage argument.Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov. Vox Media Podcast Network.Economic philosophyFriedman, Milton. “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. Original source of the “social responsibility of business” doctrine.Policy mechanismU.S. Small Business Administration. “Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program.” Federal program proposed in the piece as the vehicle for directing housing R&D toward affordable starter-home construction.Thanks for staying with me. If this piece said something true, share it with someone who needs to hear it said this way. That is how the 1850s work begins. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
