By Matthew MacIntosh

I once had a friend who became an exotic dancer. No, I never saw her dance—she was like a sister to me and I had no desire to watch her swing around a pole. She didn’t consider herself exploited and she described herself as a strong, sex-positive feminist who didn’t need society to tell her what to do with her own body. She talked about empowerment and patriarchy and subverting the dominant cultural paradigm…or something like that. I’m not really sure, actually. I spaced out by the time she got to patriarchy.

In any case, when I attended her birthday party, I found myself surrounded by intelligent, tattooed, sex-positive feminist strippers, and the conversation was engaging. They all danced at an employee owned San Francisco strip club known for featuring women with diverse body types—large and small, tall and short, black and white and brown. I met one woman who was stripping her way through law school and another who was an advocate for sex workers. It broadened my world, and since my friend vouched for me as “one of the good ones,” nearly everyone was friendly and open. At one point, I struck up a conversation with an attractive, plus-size stripper who told me that she can’t find work anywhere beyond this employee owned club. Nobody else would hire her because her body “doesn’t reflect the current socially constructed standards for beauty,” and this really upset her. Still, she found plenty of work at the club and made a respectable living. She didn’t earn as much as some women with flatter bellies, but she was a successful entrepreneur who was making it happen.

The invisible hand is good at some things and terrible at others. It does a horrible job of determining how much the lowest-paid workers should receive or whether corporations should dump toxic waste in the pond behind your apartment. It does, however, do a decent job at setting prices for goods and services provided by independent business people. I would love to get paid to take off my clothes for a living, but it’s a question of supply and demand. There are simply too many out-of-shape men willing to take their clothes off in public, and too few voyeurs willing to pay. Someone out there might be willing to pay me NOT to take my clothes off, but at what point does that become extortion?

I write for a living and I would love to earn a full-time salary musing about weird cultural phenomena, but people are willing to pay far less for my insights about life than they are for my copywriting skills. Am I a sell out? Totally. I need to eat and it beats working at a steel mill.

I would love to charge you $1,000 for reading this blog post and never write another line of ad copy again, but you’re not willing to pay that much (or anything, really). Is that your fault? Are you taking advantage of me? Of course not! I cherish the opportunity to express myself in a commercial-free zone where I can be as edgy and irreverent as I choose—until, of course, someone re-tweets this post under #EverythingShaming. I fully expect my fellow liberals to surround my apartment with pitchforks and torches someday. For now, however, I’m having a great time, and you people seem to enjoy my crazy thoughts, so I don’t mind doing it for free. Similarly, there must be a female voyeur out there who loves watching a pasty-white nerd boy take off his clothes, but he’d better not expect to make much money at it. The male exhibitionist is eager to strip and a million others are waiting in line to take his place if he gets too uppity. If you don’t believe me, post an ad on Craiglist seeking male exhibitionists and see what happens.

I had a professor at UCLA, a free-market economist, who argued that unionized workers who demand a livable wage are doing the same thing as corporations that conspire to fix prices and build monopolies. Yes, you can file that away in the “WTF?” folder, but it’s an interesting argument to deconstruct. My position on the livable wage is that every W-2 worker deserves one. Yes, if the baristas in my local café are paid more, the cost of my already expensive cappuccino will rise—and that’s a price I’m willing to pay! Profits may decrease somewhat, but if every employer is forced to pay their workers a livable wage, the ethical businesses aren’t destroyed by competitors who screw their workers and pass the savings on to you.

Yes, this amounts to a slight redistribution of wealth, and I’m fine with that. People earning a solid middle-class salary (like my stripper friends and me) ought to pay a little more for their coffee so our baristas can afford baby formula. Libertarians argue that the economy would take an enormous hit, but minimum wage laws have been in effect since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Far from destroying the economy, these regulations helped create a strong middle class, which was better for everyone.

Unfortunately, our divided federal government has done little to prevent the demise of the middle class, but changes can and do take place on a local level.  Oakland recently increased its minimum wage to $12.25 per hour, which isn’t terribly livable in this part of the world, but it’s a start! And yes, my favorite local coffee house raised its prices, so I now pay $4.00, instead of $3.75, for a cup of gourmet drip coffee that was handpicked by Ethiopians.

Now, you may be thinking, $4.00 for a cup of coffee? That’s outrageous! But the beauty of conspicuous consumption is that overpaying makes us feel like we’re getting something of greater value. Literally. When you put someone in an fMRI and tell them they’re drinking a $100 bottle of wine (when it’s really a $10 bottle), the pleasure centers in their brains light up as though they were drinking the expensive wine. The same neurotransmitters are released, and it’s precisely the same chemical reaction.  How cool is that? My baristas get a higher wage, I get to savor my expensive cup of coffee, and the only people getting fucked over are the Ethiopians.