Caritas has given government politicians the research details on which it has based its request that the minimum wage be raised. I have read the news reports, though not been privy to any details other than that, and it seems to me that we are here in dangerous living-wage waters

The Caritas report speaks of one or two adults living with two children, and then gives the minimum amount of money that they need to keep body and soul together – an amount which does not make allowance for, Caritas was wise to point out, mobile telephony, holidays and the like. I do not know the specifics of the items which Caritas considers essential, or how much it allows for each of these, but the basic requirement it suggests, at €10,634 for two parents with two children and €8,581 for one parent with two children, seem not just reasonable but, to my mind, far too low.

Yes, it is quite possible for two parents with two children to stay alive on €886 a month, if at least one of them is a clever cook and knows how to shop for food, and clothes and household items are now quite cheap compared to the price levels and lack of choice available only just a few years ago, but this kind of hand-to-mouth existence means that there is literally no money for extraordinary expenses or for the little thing that make life worth living and elevate us beyond a soul-destroying peasant-in-shack existence where the life of the mind and spirit are totally neglected and every day is a struggle for survival and a nightmare of worry. And I haven’t even begun to consider making the home a pleasant and comfortable space, which is completely impossible on that level of income, and that only serves to compound the hardship.

Yes, I do know people with families who earn wages no higher than that, but in all cases they moonlight at something else and bring in a certain amount of additional income, some of it undeclared perhaps, or the other parent does so. Typically, what happens in these situations is that the wife uses her income – and wives in this socio-economic group generally work in the black economy - for food shopping and anything related to the children, while the husband’s official wages go on the monthly overheads like water and electricity, household repairs and maintenance and the like.

But whether adults with children can survive on €8,000 to €10,000 a year, still less on the minimum wage, is not quite the point. And this is where the Caritas proposal and the genuine concerns of the organisation itself miss the mark. The minimum wage is not intended for the purpose of raising a family, still less is it meant to be sufficient income on which to support a wife without an income of her own. The minimum wage is compensation for work undertaken by a single individual, and it is there to ensure that there is no abuse by employers who will pay as little as they can get away with. With no minimum wage, where people are desperate, the situation will invariably degenerate into a slave-wages scenario as it does already with refugee workers who are too frightened or intimidated to argue for their rights, even if they know in the first place that they do have those rights.

People on the minimum wage are wholly unrealistic to even think of setting up home. They have no business getting married and expecting to support a spouse, still less bringing children into the world. It is nothing short of hideously irresponsible. Yes, accidents will and do happen, and it is a good thing to see parents now keeping those children rather than dumping them in their legions in the care of priests and nuns as they did only as recently as a generation ago. But they shouldn’t expect their employers to pay for the upkeep of their children, which is what it amounts to if those employers are ordered to pay more than the market value for the work or services they receive. It is the parents’ responsibility to work all the hours they can – both parents, that is – to find the money to pay for the upbringing of the children who they, and they alone, created. If this means taking on three or four jobs, or training at night to get a better-paid job during the day, then so be it. For those who have children and really do have no means of keeping the household together without help, there are social benefits and free-training opportunities designed to wean people off a dependency culture.

The key difference between social benefits and the ‘living wage’ idea, or raising the minimum wage as Caritas has proposed, is that the burden of social benefits is spread among all taxpayers, which makes it just, while any mandatory rise in wages for the specific purpose of allowing a man to keep a wife and family is a specific and unwarranted burden on employers, and so it is socially unjust.

It is rooted in left-wing ideas which are now seriously outdated. Contemporary left-wing thinking has been reflected in the policies of the Nationalist Party for the last generation at least: free and unbridled access for all to education and training (and in Malta’s case with the added incentive that you are paid to train, rather than paying to train) and a varied job market.

Caritas was careful to rule out all luxuries and non-essential items from its list. But by starting its calculations at one step further ahead than it should have, it has made a series of grave miscalculations and based much of its reasoning on a false premiss. The greatest and most expensive luxuries and non-essential items are, in the first place, children themselves. Caritas starts out from a false premiss because it is a Catholic organisation and in Catholic thought having children is not a luxury but a duty and an obligation in marriage.

You have no choice but to eat, wash and get dressed. But you do have a choice about having children, and if you can’t afford to have one because you’re on the minimum wage, then wait until you’re earning more, and in the meantime, train and study and work on ways towards achieving that end. Nowadays, there’s absolutely no excuse for not doing this.

In the not-so-old days, people used to have children and dump them in orphanages because they couldn’t afford to look after them. Now they have children and expect to dump the cost on their employer or the benefits’ office.

It seems to me that what Caritas really needs to do here is remind people that ‘terms and conditions apply’, to use the language of special offers, to the right to have children, and this means ensuring that by having those children you will neither become a burden on others nor serve those children ill. It is quite obvious that contraception is not an issue here, because as Caritas itself said, everybody has two children. Family-planning, however, seems to be a different matter entirely. People who plan to have children, with one of them staying home to look after them, on the minimum wage deserve to be seriously reprimanded and not encouraged in their unthinking selfishness.