Ruling Class/Elite/Coastal Elite have not yet been definitively defined by the collective, as we have a very long history of trying to pretend that America does not have classes. . Most of the people who are included in these groups tend to dispute that they even exist, they claim that what we are looking at is a lot of individuals looking after their own self interests who are not scheming with others to advance their interests as a group. And attempt as working out a definition even amongst us at DP would run at least 50 pages.
So no, I would rather not.
I will say that re this particular thread one of the top 3 arguments for the $15/H min wage in Seattle where I spend a lot of time and two of my kids live in and that my wife works in is that the owners of this society have the power to exploit workers, that the job market no longer works, and that one sure way to make sure that they are skimming less wealth off the collective is to force them to pay a higher min wage, which will in turn force them to raise almost everyone's wages as they must maintain paygrades in the organization that reflect the value of the worker. What the citizens are attempting to do is something like what the NBA does, where labor by design collects a certain high percentage of the value added by the work that is done. Now most of these people know that a $15 min wage is going to mean that some people are going to get paid more than the value of their work, at this point they turn around and say that these low value workers have to get at least that in order to afford to live in the city. As for new problems introduced into the labor market by these laws they say they first we have to try it out, and if their are problems that need to be dealt with then we will work on them later, but the main thing is to get the people the money they need to live and stick it to the owners of businesses. They also tend to doubt that higher min wages will actually cause any problems major enough that they need to be addressed.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that once they tie cost of living to the scheme wages no longer have any connection to the value of the work. Seattle rents went up 8.5% last year (largely because the city is always going to the voters asking for more money which is gotten from property taxes, and unfortunately far too many citizens are too stupid to know that they end up paying for these, not the wealthy, so the voters almost always approve) , and this has been the trend for a few years, and it looks like there is no end in sight. It will not be long before these cities that have done this will become too expensive to do business in. We are already seeing this is Silicon valley and SF.
