It really comes down to this:
It really comes down to this:
Here are seven quotes that reveal how early social reformers viewed the minimum wage and the “unemployable.”
1. “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work. Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”
– Royal Meeker, Princeton scholar and labor commissioner to Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 25
2. “How to deal with the unemployable?” asked economist Frank Taussig. They “should simply be stamped out.”
“We have not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind…”
– F. W. Taussig, Principles of Economics, Vol. 1
3. “If the inefficient entrepreneurs would be eliminated [by minimum wages,] so would the ineffective workers. I am not disposed to waste much sympathy upon either class. The elimination of the inefficient is in line with our traditional emphasis on free competition, and also with the spirit and trend of modern social economics. There is no panacea that can ‘save’ the incompetents except at the expense of the normal people. They are a burden on society and on the producers wherever they are.”
– A.B. Wolfe, American Economic Review, 1917
4. “Imbecility breeds imbecility as certainly as white hens breed white chickens; and under laissez-faire imbecility is given full chance to breed, and does so in fact at a rate far superior to that of able stocks.”
–New Republic editorial, 1916 (most likely written by Herbert Croly)
5. Henry Rogers Seager, a leading progressive economist from Columbia University, argued that worthy workers deserve protection from the “competition of the casual worker and the drifter.”
“The operation of the minimum wage requirement would merely extend the definition of defectives to embrace all individuals, who even after having received special training, remain incapable of adequate self-support…..If we are to maintain a race that is to be made up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization . . . .”
– Henry Rogers Seager, Columbia University scholar and future American Economic Association president, in 1913 (quoted from “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era”)
6. “[Wage] competition has no respect for the superior races,” said University of Wisconsin economist John R. Commons in his 1907 book Races and Immigrants ( p. 151). “The race with lowest necessities displaces others.”
7. “[The minimum wage will] protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese.”
– Arthur Holcombe of Harvard University, a member of the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, speaking approvingly of Australia’s minimum wage legislation in 1912 (quoted from “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era”)
It’s long past time to cut big business loose. They aren’t capitalist. They want to crush the middle class and pile wealth into their own grubby mitts.
Conservatives need to jettison the woke corporate class and start making them pay for their support of socialism.
Let them feel the pain of regulation, taxes, ect... and make it so painful that they won’t be able to maintain their stranglehold over the marketplace so that small businesses can reassert themselves once again.
Big business is not your friend. They actively fund the LEFT.
Dump national name brands. Buy local/generic as much as possible.
It is a twofer.
Hurt LEFTIST supporting businesses.
Reduce advertising that supports the LEFTIST media.
The Democrats aren’t socialists/communists.
The Democrats are an organized crime syndicate.
Businesses have to pay them protection money.....or else.
These people are not conservative and have not been since Ronald Reagans day. We lower their taxes and suddenly they don’t need us. They are cosmopolitans who look down on the middle class and our culture with disdain. They know full well that the Democrats are not going to redistribute their income. They are going to redistribute our income to them. One of the biggest fault lines in the Democrat party is the line between these corporate urban cosmopolitan elites and the radical socialists in their lower echelons and base. If we the conservative middle class were to demand that they pay their fair share as they are not than we could drive a wedge between their base and the elites. We would also cause our own GOP elites to stand up and take notice. The only part of Conservative middle class Republicans that have any input is the NRA not because country club GOP elites believe in guns but because they know they will have a tiger by the tail. There is a lesson in this.