Editorial Cartoon: Minimizing sense, maximizing wages

The people who are harmed by an increase in the minimum wage are low-skilled workers. Mainly blacks and the 15-25 youth.

Try this question “do-gooder” Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) who argue against the unemployment effect of raising the minimum wage: Would a smart employer more likely pay a worker $15 an hour when that worker HAS SKILLS that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value an hour to the employer’s output? Most employers would view hiring such a worker as a LOSING economic proposition, but they might hire him at $5 an hour. Thus, one effect of the minimum wage law is that of discrimination against the employment of low-skilled workers.

Minimum wage laws make it ILLEGAL for a struggling person to be employed if his wage is below the minimum. Therefore, he is left unemployed. He will not get the skills at the lower-paying job that will enable him to make a higher wage later.

In America, the least skilled people are youths, who lack the skills, maturity and experience of adults. Black youths not only share these handicaps but have attended grossly inferior schools and live in unstable households. That means higher minimum wages will have the greatest unemployment effect on youths, particularly black youths.

A minimum wage not only discriminates against low-skilled workers but also is one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of racists. Our nation’s first minimum wage came in the form of the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which sets minimum wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects. During the legislative debates, racist intents were obvious. Rep. John Cochran, D-Mo., said he had “received numerous complaints in recent months about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South.” Rep. Miles Allgood, D-Ala., complained: “That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.” Rep. William Upshaw, D-Ga., complained of the “superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor.”

During South Africa’s apartheid era, the secretary of it’s avowedly racist Building Workers’ Union, Gert Beetge, said, “There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances, I support the rate for the job (minimum wage) as the second-best way of protecting our white artisans.” The South African Economic and Wage Commission of 1925 reported that “while definite exclusion of the Natives from the more remunerative fields of employment by law has not been urged upon us, the same result would follow a certain use of the powers of the Wage Board under the Wage Act of 1925, or of other wage-fixing legislation. The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would be likely to be employed.”

It is incompetence or dishonesty for leftwing politicians like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to deny these two effects of minimum wages: discrimination against employment of low-skilled labor and the lowering of the cost of racial discrimination.