In the latest additiontoMike Rowe’s growing catalogof pointed Facebook responses, the former Dirty Jobs host tackles a question on the minimum wage, answering a man named “Darrell Paul,” who asks:

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 and hour. A lot of people think it should be raised to $10.10. Seattle now pays $15 an hour, and the The Freedom Socialist Party is demanding a $20 living wage for every working person. What do you think about the minimum wage? How much do you think a Big Mac will cost if McDonald’s had to pay all their employees $20 an hour?

Rowe begins by recounting a job he hadworkingat a movie theater for $2.90 per hour (the minimum wage in 1979). He served his customers, learned a host of new skills, andreceivedseveral promotions in due course. Eventually, hedecided to move on,pursuing areas closer tohis vocational aspirations.

He worked. He learned. He launched.

Turning back tothe present (and future), Rowe is concerned about thewaysvarious laborpolicies have prodded many business owners to innovate ever-closertofull-blown automation, leading to ever-fewer opportunities for unskilled workers. “My job as an usher [at the theater] was the first rung on a long ladder of work that lead me to where I am today,” Rowe writes. “But what if that rung wasn’t there?”

For some, however, there is little to be gained from such a lowly rung. As Rowe explains, he received significant backlash from an organization called Jobs With Justice for simply narrating mercial for Walmart.Ignoring the tremendous value and opportunity that Walmart provides formany low-skilled workers (and in turn, the value and service those workers deliver tothe rest of us), Jobs With Justicechose instead to label suchpositionsas “bad jobs.”

Rowe’s counter is as follows (emphasis added):

While I’m sympathetic to employees who want to be paid fairly, I prefer to help on an individual basis. I’m also skeptical that a modest pay increase will make an unskilled worker less reliant upon an employer whom they affirmatively resent. I explained this to Jobs With Justice in an open letter, and invited anyone who felt mistreated to explore the many training opportunities and scholarships available through mikeroweWORKS. I further explained that I couldn’t join them in their fight against “bad jobs,” because frankly, I don’t believe there is such a thing. My exact words were, “Some jobs pay better, some jobs smell better, and some jobs have no business being treated like careers. But work is never the enemy, regardless of the wage. Because somewhere between the job and the paycheck, there’s still a thing called opportunity, and that’s what people need to pursue.”

People are always surprised to learn that many of the subjects on Dirty Jobs were millionaires — entrepreneurs who crawled through a river of crap, prospered, and created jobs for others along the way. Men and women who started with nothing and built a going concern out of the dirt. I was talking last week with my old friend Richard, who owns a small but prosperous pany in California. Richard still hangs drywall and sheetrock with his aging crew because he can’t find enough young people who want to learn the construction trades. Today, he’ll pay $40 an hour for a reliable welder, but more often than not, he can’t find one. Whenever I talk to Richard, and consider the number of millennials within 50 square miles of his office stocking shelves or slinging hash for the minimum wage, I can only shake my head.

Indeed, at itsvery root, this is not about money or pensation.” It’s about our fundamental perspective onwork itself.

Obsessed with material output and superficial leveling, the wage-fixing wizards who disdain thesearrangementswield significantdamage on the economic imagination,obscuring the path to opportunity and long-term prosperity.Wealth creation is a hard and messy thing, not beholden to the loud barks and wand-wavingof planning-class mobs. The more we stifle and stunt that process, pretending that esfrom spreadsheets and materialistic theories about “fairness,” the harder it will be for all of us.

But although Rowe is correct to argue that we should instead pursue opportunity, we’d do well to remember that it’s not just about ensuring that Worker Xcan more easily navigatefrom here to there. Bound up in that process is thewhole-life transformation that occurs through the work itself, something we oughtnot dilute or derail with artificial injections, manipulations, and distractions. Opening the doors forreal opportunities driven by real signals that represent real human needs provides increased and sustained prosperityfor all, and with the supporting es dignity and a path towardservice, stewardship, provision, generosity, and (if you’re so munion with God and neighbor.

When Rowe says “there’s no such thing as a bad job,” he doesn’t mean that work won’t sometimes be hard and difficult and toilsome and unfair. He means that through eachseason, work orients our hearts and hands in healthy,formative, sacrificial, and productive ways, and we best not trample over the ponents that such aprocess provides.By tinkering with and bickering over thebyproducts (the numbers, the paychecks, the contracts),we do nothing to improve the source.“Doesn’t matter how well-intended the policy,” Roweconcludes. “The true cost a $20 minimum wage has less to do with the price of a Big Mac, and more to do with a sound of thunder.”

As we put our hands to the plow and train up the next generation to do the same, let our attitudes and goals not be determined or drivenby the price of a paycheck or Big Mac, but grounded inthe service and sacrifice it represents.Lessthunder. More flourishing.