Ah...the return to Elizabethan England.  Where the elites and landed gentry all had maids and butlers and nannies.

Somebody has been watching FAR to much Downton Abby and Upstairs Downstairs.

I'm hesitant to defend Yglesias here, but what the heck. Not many maids in the U.S. resemble the house servants featured in Downton Abbey. Instead, they service multiple homes and rarely spend more than a couple hours a week at each place.

I hire a maid. She comes once every three or four weeks and cleans my one-bedroom apartment for $80. I don't have a lot money, but I hate housecleaning, and before I used a maid, I would procrastinate cleaning until my place was a pigsty. A maid also avoids what would have been inevitable domestic strife with my partner. So for me, it's well worth the cost.

OK, so that's great for my partner and me. What about the maid? She was a doctor in Russia but was desperate to come to the U.S. for the sake of her son. For a long time, she didn't have papers and worked under the table cleaning houses. She's legal now but still cleans. Her teenage son helps out. I expect that he will go to college and become some sort of professional.

My partner, incidentally, is also a Russian immigrant. Her parents were both educated professionals in the Soviet Union--an engineer and a physicist. They immigrated here in the early 1990s. Her mother found work as a nanny and babysitter. Her father never found work.  But they came to the U.S. for the sake of their two daughters. My partner is a doctor, finishing up her training. Her sister is a software engineer.

Should maids be paid more? Yes they should, as should every low-wage earner in the country, including grocery clerks, waiters, dishwaters, gas station attendants, and (ahem) writers. But caricaturing Yglesias as some modern-day nobleman who secretly dreams of a new servile class is unfair. Paying someone to clean your house is not so different from paying someone to bag your groceries or deliver your pizza. And the people who clean houses are not bound by social constraints to generations of servitude. Many of them are just trying to earn a living so their kids can do something else.