Hoo boy are you wrong. You are so, so wrong. I was hoping you were being ironic, but apparently you're serious. Raising minimum wage and cutting working hour

Hoo boy are you wrong. You are so, so wrong. I was hoping you were being ironic, but apparently you're serious. Raising minimum wage and cutting working hours will drop productivity like a stone. You're effectively saying that all workers are equal, and interchangeable. You want to forcibly stop the more productive ones from working, so that their tasks and livelihoods can be given to others. In the case of a software company you're introducing the twin evils of bad hires and oversized teams. For what? An inferior product produced at a higher price. Dropping productivity means a drop in living standards for everyone, not just the rich people. The reason people are out of work is because too many people are paying back too much debt, and that equates to negative savings. Minimum wages increase unemployment because they set a price floor above the clearing price for the going price of a worker. Now, that's not an argument for getting rid of minimum wages, but you can't argue against the reality of what they do. The solution is to continue paying back debt, and learn the lesson not to borrow so much next time around. Yes, that sucks, but hard lessons seldom have pleasant consequences. If you want to stop a lot of wealth accumulating at the top end of the pyramid, by all means break up banking cartels and break the ties between legislators and big business, you won't get many arguments from most people. But fairyland schemes to force people to pay more than wages are worth, and force people to work less hours than they want? Hello, central planning. Hello, centralised control. The only way for this to work is to put the needs of the state above the needs of the individual. Which must, by definition, mean less individual freedom and more state control. What are you going to do with someone who works more than 35 hours? Lock them up at the point of a gun? "Wasteful excessive consumerism" is an entirely relative proposition. One persons waste is another satisfactory standard of living. To impose an arbitary living standard on someone is to completely control their lives. You're asking everyone to do less work. Less work by definition means less production, and less production means a lower living standard. And guess where the bulk of that lower living standard will fall - that's right, you can bet your peasant clothes it won't be on the 1%. To conclude : you're effectively asking for centralised control of peoples wages, centralised control of how much a person can work, and centralised and arbitary division of what is small, medium and large business for the purposes of handing out favors, subsidies and handouts. Eventually businesses will start to fail and so will seek more handouts, bailouts, concessions or are nationalised because they are vital to society (eg mining, energy, farming). You've effectively described a blend of National Socialism and Stalinism. And we know that both eventually lead to mass murder and misery of millions. This experiment has been tried before, it ends badly for all involved. I hope you're young and still learning, because if you're of any reasonable age, you should know better by now.