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I do support a “minimum wage” (though I don’t know what it should be); I think “living wage” laws are something completely different and more destructive.

The history of this country has shown that if companies can make you work 7 days a week, buy all of your necessities and rent your housing from the same company, and have you somehow indebted to them at the end of each pay period, they will. While people today point at European socialism as a terrible failure, the fact is that their system worked from the Industrial Revolution for over a hundred years while they supplied the globe with finished products; it was dragged down by entitlements and stagnant populations (as our system now is), but the fact is that they were competitive for a long time with a working balance between their workforces and the employers.

Americans today fail to realize we are in a similar situation to that faced by Europe years ago; when the plight of the average person has fallen to a certain point, they resort to communism as a means to address it (hence the election of Obama in 2008). European governments took steps to ensure that their workers weren’t idled by the Third World (with some success), while our governments were quite content to not just send our jobs overseas. At some point “globalization” has to be viewed as the threat that it is to our country and way of life; there is absolutely no defense/excuse for the destruction of our manufacturing base, and no reason anyone should expect Americans to be content with their daily bowl of noodles in their rented apartments with their leased cars.

I don’t know what the answer is, but we haven’t found it yet.