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The Real Minimum Wage Is Zero

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Thomas Sowell

The esteemed economist Thomas Sowell quipped, “Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero.”  California is sadly learning this hard lesson as we speak.

Many California workers went from “Hurray!” to pink slips after California voters sent zealots into seats of power across the state to enact zany laws, like AB 1228.  Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill last year that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour for fast-food workers (with an exception for a donor), his legislative super-majorities guaranteeing the outcome.  The lid was off for minimum wage hikes in the state’s other industries and in the many specific locales in the state enthralled by collectivist dreams.  Now, the reality: everyone didn’t get the leap in pay.  Many of those so-called “oppressed” found their hours cut or sent home without any hours, having lost their jobs.

All of this is a reminder of another Sowell witticism: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”  You can only get things after giving up other things. The politicos issued the decree, “Thou shalt pay no one less than $20 per hour”, that led to those still facing a bottom line to cope by reducing the payroll.  So, the numbskulls in power unwittingly created a “nominal” minimum wage, and a “real” one: nominal = $20; real = $0!

Lee E. Ohanian with the Independent Institute chronicles the number of workers who were zeroed out in the ungolden state (see #1 below).  9,500 lost employment in the state’s fast-food industry from fall to January of this year.  Pizza Hut and Roundtable said goodbye to 1,300 delivery personnel.  El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box are shifting to robots.  Thus, total employment in the state’s private sector during the same interval dropped .2%.  Is this “Bidenomics”, or maybe “Newsomnomics”?

Prices are jumping with the minimum wage boost: Wendy’s 8%, Chipotle 7.5%, Starbucks 7%, and others like McDonalds will be announcing hikes soon.  Fast food is a good with high elasticity (clientele is sensitive to price changes).  So, they can only raise prices to the point when the loss of business begins to eat into the business model.  Scott Roderick, a McDonald’s franchisee, said, “I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals.”  If he doesn’t, and economically can’t, he may have to close shop.  How many then will join the ranks of the “real” minimum wage?

An economist at the Employment Policies Institute, Rebekah Paxton, lays out more carnage as the fever for $20 spreads to the other surviving remnants of the state’s shrinking private sector (see #2 below).  The neo-Marxist SEIU is chomping at the bit to ruin other businesses in the state.  West Hollywood is a microcosm of the elected lunacy gripping the state.  Making their SEIU donors happy, the city proclaimed a $17.64 minimum wage for hotel workers.  The union used this leverage to make it apply everywhere in the city.  Currently, the “nominal” minimum wage stands at $19.08.

Predictably, many formerly joyous workers in the city are discovering that their services are no longer needed.  Staff cuts of 30-40% are routine. 85 businesses in the city were shuttered last year.  The 30-40% are back to $0.

Since Biden and the poohbahs of the donkey party are keen to hitch the nation to the California train, expect more of us across the nation to suffer, even those of us who fled the People’s Republic.  Nationalizing lunacy is their chief aim.  When will they learn that you can’t suspend the laws of nature, and the laws of economics that rise from them?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “California Loses Nearly 10,000 Fast-Food Jobs After $20 Minimum Wage Signed Last Fall”, Lee E. Ohanian, The Independent Institute, 4/26/2024, at https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14919&utm_source=FFF+Daily&utm_campaign=252dd0222c-FFF+Daily+2024-05-04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1139d80dff-252dd0222c-318121705
2. “California’s Predictably Disastrous Minimum-Wage Hikes”, Rebekah Paxton, National Review, 5/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/californias-predictably-disastrous-minimum-wage-hikes/

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The Radicalization Began Much Earlier

NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus
NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus in New York City on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Multiple students were arrested as officers cleared an encampment on the campus’ lawn. (Peter Gerber for Fox News Digital)

In many cases, if not most, the students (and non-students) occupying buildings, entire swaths of many campuses, supporting the barbarism of Hamas and expressing Jew-hatred, were radicalized before they arrived in higher ed.  They didn’t suddenly discover their inner Marx in their college Sociology class.  Predating the college acceptance letter, they were long marinated in the revolutionary dialectic, probably without even knowing it.

Parents, dropping your kids off at school for six hours and off you go on your merry way meant relegating their minds to God knows what.  Well, we’re getting a glimpse of the consequence at places like Columbia, et al.

Robert P. George, professor and scholar at Princeton and other schools, acknowledges as much. See at https://www.foxnews.com/video/6352285225112.

Red Mass speaker Robert P. George announced - Today's Catholic
Prof. Robert P. George, Princeton University

RogerG

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Charles Malik, A Christian Clairvoyant

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Charles Malik (l) and today’s “student” protesters

Who was Charles Malik (1906-1987)?  A devout Christian, he’s a man of public service with a distinguished academic pedigree at a time when the academy wasn’t so overwhelmingly sullied in doctrinaire neo-Marxism.  Of Lebanese nationality, an escapee from Nazi Germany and move to the US to complete his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard, he taught at the school and other American universities.  He returned to his native Lebanon to serve as the country’s ambassador to the US after WWII and helped author the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  And he proved to be a prophet of things to come at our colleges.

In 1980, he delivered an address at Wheaton College warning of the moral chaos of the current reign of philosophical materialism and nihilism (rejection of objective standards, the basic guideposts for human flourishing) that he saw conquering the campuses 40 years ago (see #1 and #2 below).  He put part of the blame at the feet of intellectual Christians, and Christian leaders in general, who abandoned the academy to the philosophical barbarians.  Much of evangelical Christianity embraced political activism – the Moral Majority, et al – but at the same time scurried off into their own social silos, leaving the intellectual training grounds for future generations to be swamped by militant secular collectivists of all stripes.  As he put it, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”

The Humanities (literature, philosophy, languages, theology, art, etc.) were mangled beyond recognition.  While declining in funding and enrollment, even in their tortured form, they still proved to be influential in shaping the minds of the next couple of generations down to the present day.  There is no alternative to the rule of materialism’s atheism from K to grad school.  It’s what happens when you abandon the field.

In response, a kind of anti-intellectualism took root in many Christian circles.  Honestly, who can blame them after what they’re seeing in posts and broadcasts today from campuses around the country?  Charles Malik warned us, though.  It’s a consequence of a sin of omission of the Christian community: a surrender of the field to the brutes.

By the faithful’s flight from the campuses, we allowed a takeover that would breed future generations of pillagers of our civilization.  It isn’t pretty as the next crop of young people will be robbed of the benefit of a more robust learning experience that more fully enriches our sense of ourselves.  Instead, we have encampments that extoll savagery.

Indeed, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”

RogerG

Sources:
1. “The Two Tasks”, an address delivered by Dr. Charles Malik at Wheaton College, 1980, The Charles Malik Institute, at https://charlesmalikinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Two-Tasks-green.pdf
2. Thanks to Joseph Loconte, scholar in residence at New College of Florida, for bringing the subject to my attention in “A Christian Prophet’s Unheeded Warning to the Academy”, National Review, 5/4/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/a-christian-prophets-unheeded-warning-to-the-academy/

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An Israeli PhD Student at Stanford Mugged by Reality

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A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)

Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality.  A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”

Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”.  His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).

A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.

“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America].  No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump.  But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction.  A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness.  No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”

The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses.  High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below).  Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools.  Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole.  How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed?  The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks.  When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.

And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s.  Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.

It’s everywhere.  It’s on YouTube.  For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes.  It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more.  No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad).  It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good.  16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”.  You know the banter.

This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away.  Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself.  For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings.  Quoting him:

“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes.  I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth.  They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly.  They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”

Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth.  You might be surprised at the answer.

There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind.  The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first