Why do we pay people?

JPII writes:

…[Christ] who, while being God, became like us in all things devoted most of the years of his life on earth to manual work at the carpenter’s bench. This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent “Gospel of work”, showing that the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person.

John Paul II. (1981). Laborem Exercens #6.

Capitalism says, in a nutshell, that we pay people for the value of their work.  And the guy signing the paycheck is constantly driven by market forces to figure out ways to tell the worker that his work is not worth all that much while the work of the guy signing the paycheck is worth more and more.  The ideal arrangement is to get maximum work for minimum pay because profit is the goal.  Man is, in this system, made for the law (specifically, property law), not the law for man.

The Christian tradition says we pay people because of the value of the worker as a human being.  Hence the concept of a “living wage”.  And hence the perpetual need of those hostile to the Christian vision of work to fake bafflement and confusion over the concept of a living wage.

Here it is:

A living wage fulfills four criteria:

1. Families in general seem to be living at a standard of decency appropriate to their society;
2. They do so without working undue hours;
3. They do so without wives being forced to work outside the home or children forced to work inappropriate hours or under inappropriate conditions (if they choose to do so, that’s another story);
4. They do so without undue reliance on government support or consumer credit.

This used to be common sense.  There was a time when a man with a sixth grade education could raise a family and send them to college while working in a warehouse.  I know people who came from just such families.  But now the argument put forward (often by Catholic libertarian court prophets for the despoilment of the middle class by the 1%) is that such people are losers who should have gotten a better education.  Their work, not them, is the only thing to be considered.  Often the same court prophets are eager to remind such warehouse workers that they must never practice artificial contraception under pain of mortal sin and that that they will be punished for having too many kids and being welfare and health care parasites when they cannot feed and care for them on the wages of a warehouse worker.

For some reason, those getting poorer under our system are increasingly convinced that conservative Catholic libertarians are full of crap and only cherry pick those bits of the Tradition useful to accessorize their political dogmas.

A complete view of the human person–as distinct from false Libertarian religion–says that the law, including property law, is made for man, not man for the law and that work is valuable because humans do it rather than that humans are only valuable insofar as they can produce.  The reduction of humans to mere means of wealth generation is the heresy common to both communism and capitalism.

The reason we pay people and not machines is because people have dignity and machines do not.  And if we make it our object to pay people the bare minimum possible and not a living wage, our end goal, sooner or later, will be to figure out a way to not pay them at all.  We are already well on the way to that, and the outer edges of a slave economy can well be defined this way: Any person who can neither live on nor escape his job is a slave.  He is not yet so much a slave as victims of other, deeper forms of slavery.  But a slave he is nonetheless.

I wonder, given this definition, how much of the US economy is already a slave economy?