Search ‘Minimum Wage‘ on these pages, and you will find a wealth of information on the issue. Learn about New Hampshire’s unique advantage on the matter. And how its promised expansion is little more than virtue signaling by Democrats whose ideological ancestors invented it to keep people down. Something it continues to do today everywhere it is tried.
None of those truths are new. But we continue to find ourselves confronted with Liberal solutions that create the problem they claim to cure. Democrats in New Hampshire are hankering to raise the minimum wage based on talking points that are false or fail to include facts on the ground.
Drew Cline from the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy laid it out again here.
- In New Hampshire, the number of minimum wage workers fell by almost half in 2017, dropping from just over 15,000 people in 2016 to just 8,000 in 2017, according to the state Economic and Labor Market Information Bureau. Forty-nine percent of those 8,000 minimum-wage earners were under age 25, and the same percentage worked part-time.
New Hampshire doesn’t have a wage=poverty problem so Democrats would like to create one.
The evidence against meddling is overwhelming
Every liberal laboratory that has embraced wage fixing has harmed low-income workers not helped them. Forced prices higher for everyone. Even driven employers out of business.
And still, we have the inability of the state (in the form of a temporary majority) to restrain itself from imposing force even when that exercise does more harm than good. What James Madison called “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in government.” And in this instance, the force creates that constituency.
The mantra that the Left is the defender of the poor is a lie. Price fixing by the government makes it more difficult for low-income workers to find work. It keeps them poor. Creating a pool of activists who will then advocate for the left’s other destructive policies that add to their numbers.
A circumstance that Albert Jay Nock observes creates a conscious condition where the people deliberately relinquish other responsibilities to the state. ‘When the State intervenes to fix wages and prices, or to prescribe the conditions of competition, it tells the job creator that they are “doing it wrong.’
“and therefore proposes to confiscate his power and exercise it according to the State’s own judgment of what is best. Hence the enterpriser’s instinct is to let the State look after the consequences.”
As a simple illustration of this, a manufacturer of a highly specialized type of textiles was saying to me the other day that he had kept his mill going at a loss for five years because he did not want to turn his workpeople on the street in such hard times, but now that the State has stepped in to tell him how he must run his business, the State might jolly well take the responsibility.
Government Makes People Poor
Milton Friedman, in this short snippet from his lecture series, describes our culpability. Government meddling makes people poor when we allow it. And the minimum wage, created by Progressives to discriminate on black Americans, to keep them poor, does the same thing today that it did when it was first proposed. It uses government force to set a price for labor that deliberately blocks unskilled labor from acquiring on-the-job-training to become skilled.
Trapped in poverty by the state, they turn to the state for relief. Encouraged to do so by the culture created by the welfare state.
If New Hampshire Democrats successfully pass unnecessary wage fixing they will accomplish at least two things. We’ll have higher unemployment, and our rate of poverty will rise.
To their presumed benefit as a party, in pursuit of accumulating government force, but to the benefit of no one else.
Video Hat Tip | Don Ewing
Albert Jay Nock | Our Enemy the State