2006/07/30 - José Carlos Rodríguez - Libertad Digital

Minimum Wage and Progressive Racism

Lead by George W. Bush’s heavy hand, Republicans have abandoned principle in some small corner of a dark closet. The last straw came when they proposed and passed a law that raised the minimum wage while sneaking in a reduction in the death tax.

Republicans should have explained why this tax is unjust, but they lacked resolve. They have no principles from which to defend repealing the state’s final act of plunder –reaching into tomb to rob its citizens. Instead, feeling they needed to apologize for wanting to eliminate this tax, Republicans added a increase in the minimum wage to the law.

Perhaps, with Bush gone from the White House, the Republican Party will return to its Reagan roots. Regardless, libertarians in both hemispheres should have no more confidence in the Democratic Party. Spanish progressives have adopted Democrats as if they represented a resistance movement inside enemy territory, and they are right to do so. On more than one occasion they have shared in their misery. Democrats are the great defenders of the minimum wage. For progressivism-without-borders, the minimum wage is one of its most valued intellectual and moral trinkets. But fixing this wage attacks the freedom of businessmen and workers to negotiate a salary that benefits both sides. It harms the young and, in particular, society’s poorest. The poorest are unable to earn an income above the minimum wage and are expelled from the labour market, condemned to unemployment or the black market, with all the attendant social consequences.

Immigrants, with less formal education than native workers, are the most affected by this anti-social measure. And they know it. The progressives, I mean. In its golden age, many American progressives were deeply racist. A recent study finds that some of them saw the minimum wage as the perfect tool for social eugenics: it kept women and blacks out of the labour market. In another article, the same author writes "many reformist economists pushed restrictive immigration and labour legislation because of their eugenic benefits —removing biologically inferior elements from the workforce, went the argument, would reduce "racial suicide" and elevate the wages of superior workers, who deserved it."

It was another time, some might say, and the eugenic ideal had a popularity back then that it doesn't enjoy now —it needed a new look, like "scientific progress," to move forward. But there are some things that don’t change, like proposing the minimum wage to expel immigrants from the labour market. The idea reappeared in an article written by two Democrats and published in The New York Times, the mouthpiece of world progressivism. Michael Dukakis and Daniel Mitchell realized that "millions of illegal immigrants work for minimum wage, and even below minimum wage, in jobs that don’t come close to meeting health and safety standards." If we expel them from the legal workforce by increasing the minimum wage and imposing other regulations, they won't have anything to do and will leave room for...you know, us. Americans "will work in risky, dirty or pitiful jobs to the degree they are receive decent salaries and working conditions," that is, above the minimum wage. Throw the immigrants to the streets and give Americans their old jobs. It’s not that they confuse the social consequences of the minimum wage. They know them well. And they help achieve progressive objectives.