Skip

For progressives, a legal minimum wage had the useful property of sorting the unfit, who would lose their jobs, from the deserving workers, who would retain their jobs.  Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist who served as Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Commissioner of Labor, opposed a proposal to subsidize the wages of poor workers for this reason.  Meeker preferred a wage floor because it would disemploy unfit workers and thereby enable their culling from the work force.

-Thomas Leonard (“Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era” )

Prof. Don Beaudreaux adds:

Few policies have origins as ugly as that of the minimum wage.  “Progressive” intellectuals in the early 20th century supported the minimum wage because they believed it to be an effective policy detergent to help cleanse the gene pool of ‘undesirables.’

Read more

Guess what blatant reactionary wrote the following words: “It seems plausible to wonder if government can build a nation abroad, fight social decay, run schools, mandate the design of cars, run health insurance exchanges, or set proper sexual harassment policies on college campuses, if it can’t even fix a 232-foot bridge competently.”

Stumped? The answer is Lawrence Summers, secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, presidential senior economic adviser in the Obama administration and, in between, president of Harvard, writing in the Washington Post. For more on the fiasco of the rebuilding of the Larz Anderson Bridge, between Cambridge and Boston’s Allston neighborhood, see another opinion article by Summers in the Boston Globe.

As it happens, I wrote a column myself back in 2010 on how long it was taking to fix the Humpback Bridge,

Read more

Yup, the liberal folks at Google showed their wonderful thanks to our veterans today:

I put the red square around their beneficent acknowledgement just to make sure you didn’t miss it. Oh by the way, remember that last week Google decided to “honor” a US hating activist / Osama Bin Laden supporter, Yuri Kochiyama:

Read more

The UL has yet another evergreen piece on if NH would keep its FITN status during Presidential primaries as the RNC is already contemplating changing things up for the next primary.  Nothing new but what caught my eye was the complete idiocy on the part of  NH GOP RNC Committeeman Steve Duprey – it’s like he’s absolutely clueless on the differences between the Federal Government and “the various States” – and the Republican Party:

In any prospective leap-frogging on the nominating calendar, New Hampshire would maintain its leadoff primary status, but face a penalty for delegates not being seated. Anyway, that’s one view or possibility.

Efforts to have a “closed primary” system, closing the door to independents, runs counter to the 10th amendment, which assigns powers not delegated to the U.S. to the states and the people, Duprey contends.

Read more