The current feel-good push for a $15 an hour minimum wage has nothing to do with helping workers and everything to do with advancing the goals of the left wing, especially the labor movement.
This is true despite the occasionally soaring rhetoric of President Obama amid the Left’s incessant whining about “income inequality,” itself a particularly un-American concept, an imaginary evil that dwells only in the nightmares of left-wingers. The fact gets lost that the minimum wage itself and continuing increases in the minimum wage hurt working people. Period. And as economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, minimum wage laws themselves have an inglorious history, having been used to price minorities out of labor markets. If a racist business owner has a choice between a person whose race he likes and someone whose race he doesn’t like and their services cost the same, take a guess whom he’ll pick.
Raising the hourly minimum wage, whether to a job-killing $15 or a higher dollar figure, isn’t intended to aid those who are financially struggling. It’s not compassionate; in fact it’s the opposite. It doesn’t help the poor. It’s a left-wing vote-buying scam that moves money around on an Alinskyite chess board. Democrats desperately want to recapture the House and Senate so they can impose even more destructive progressive policies on the populace. They use the minimum wage, which has become a “motherhood” issue for the Left in recent years. It gets bleeding-heart voters to the polls the way that opposition to same-sex marriage used to get conservative voters to the polls.
Hiking required hourly pay is about redistributing wealth to fat-cat labor unions and recruiting Democratic voters. It allows the gluttonous Left to gorge itself on other people’s money.
No serious economist doubts that raising the minimum wage eliminates jobs from the workforce. How it does this is not rocket science.
Workers whose skills aren’t worth $15 an hour to employers, teenagers for example, won’t get hired. Summer jobs and part-time jobs for students evaporate which makes young scholars more dependent on student loan programs. Businesses like fast food purveyors don’t want to be forced out of business. Justifiably insistent on preserving their profitability, they fire employees and install specialized robots and touch-screen ordering systems. Major restaurant chains and gas station-convenience stores are already doing this.
Some of the newly unemployed people end up on welfare which helps to expand the size and scope of government. People who are dependent on the government tend to support Democrats. It’s a big win-win for the Left no matter how you look at it.
New York’s loud left-wing demagogue of a governor, the relentlessly strident Andrew Cuomo (D), wants to impose the $15 an hour wage mandate on a specific industry without bothering to consult the state legislature in Albany because he knows such a move is a crowd pleaser. A panel of lapdogs appointed by Cuomo gave him political cover by recommending last week that the minimum wage be raised to $15 for all fast-food restaurant chains of a certain size in New York State.
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