Once again, I can rely on Meet The Press to throw up some blog fodder from Socialistic Communitarians that believe that there should never be Liberty in action – you WILL be made to care (as Erick Erickson from RedState puts it) and contribute. Former President Bill Clinton on the idea of raising the minimum wage:
So I think it should be raised because I don’t think that, and I think that all consumers should be prepared to pay for it, because I think somebody that works full time and has kids they ought to be able to raise their kids without being in poverty
Lest you have not heard, this is the guy that has lived almost entirely on the taxpayer dime his entire adult life and has made over $100 million for flapping his gums since his Presidency was over (given his proclivity of NOT retreating into history like most ex-Presidents, I cannot say “since his Presidency faded into history”). And trust me, I do not begrudge him making that fortune even as I may question the sanity of those that provided it, but that is one of the narrowly focused results of Big Government.
What I do take exception to is that Communitarian outlook that we should ALL be forced into paying for what he, as a Elite, believes to be a simple fact of life that simply working should afford one “a living wage” – a distorted repudiation of all history of humanity up until now. There is no “Right” to expect that working for minimum wage should result in a life by which life is “decent” and certainly not one that can support a family. Believing so, and demanding so, is a complete ignorance of Bastiat’s Broken Window axiom as well as suspending reality in the area of economics and the traditional value of a minimum wage. Which, having signed both the front and back sides of payroll checks, is wrong in the first place as it started out as a stealth Jim Crow mechanism to keep implementing racism and now serves as a blocking mechanism to the lower rungs of our economic ladder to those at the bottom from developing the experience and skills to allow them to progress, I just wish we’d ditch it all together. Sorry, I don’t believe that micro-managing the relationship between an employer and an employee is the Proper Role of Governmnt. Ensuring that whatever contract has been mutually agreed to, yes. Dictating what should be in that contract, no. Europe does and has been doing that for a long time and there are those that wish to turn the US into Europe West – but just examine how distorted the labor market is there and then tell me that this is “progress”.
And unlike Progressives that merely mouth the word “progress” and NEVER want to define what that means, my use of “progress” means ascending that ladder, earning more money for more learned and more economically valued skill sets by which they become more valuable to their employers (and other potential employers or setting up shop for themselves).
