"Living wage" is a racist scam to create more serfs of the state

A little history to begin:

In 2013, John Hawkins posted, "20 Questions Liberals Can't Answer." I responded in my own post that of course they can answer them, quite easily - but they won't answer them honestly because the political cost would be too high, so I provided the answers.

Here was question 16:

16) A minimum wage raises salaries for some workers at the cost of putting other workers out of jobs entirely. What's the acceptable ratio for that? For every 10 people who get a higher salary, how many are you willing to see lose their jobs?
It is easy for the media to find and interview someone who is employed at minimum wage and will express gratitude that we pushed through a raise for him/her. It is almost impossible to identify an individual whose job was cut because of the minimum wage increase and the media would not interview such a person anyway. So it's win-win for us all around: We tell low wage earners that only we will protect their new wage level and that the evil Tea Bagger Republicans want to keep them in poverty. So once again your question makes no sense because employment isn't the point; trapping people into voting blocs is the point.

In 2003, I postulated that a mandated minimum wage probably serves to keep wages down, not up.

If the sewers are to be shoveled, and the other necessary but dirty jobs done, it can only be done by compulsion or by offering a reward high enough to make it worth someone’s while. That doesn’t mean that the voluntary worker will be paid a lot; I know that the garbage collectors in my town are not driving new Lincolns. It does mean that a true free-market the wage offered will have to be raised until there are takers.

The Soviet state never eliminated poverty. Until its end enormous numbers of its peasantry, the serfs, lived in conditions barely materially better than under the Czar’s reign. And they were no more free, since the communist government forbade them to leave the land.

The federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. Would there be any sewer shovelers who would voluntarily accept that wage if true free-market forces prevailed? I am wondering - and some smart readers please leave a comment - whether the federal min-wage law actually keeps the poor down because it sets a legal wage ceiling, not a floor, above which employers don’t really have to pay.

There was a time (1987) when even the New York Times got it:

The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable - and fundamentally flawed. It's time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.

Some states or municipalities are mandating a min-wage of $15 per hour. Since we know, as Leftists do not, that money doesn't grow on trees, where will the money come from to pay for the increase? Service industries will be hardest hit, especially food service and restaurants. San Francisco has seen numerous restaurants close because, as one closing manager said, "There is only so much you can charge for tacos."

Finally, NR explained in 2017 the work of economists at the University of Washington:

The study, commissioned by the city government of Seattle and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that Seattle’s law incrementally raising its minimum wage — to $13 an hour last year, en route to $15 — resulted in low-wage workers’ earning less money rather than more. This surprised many in Seattle, who had been assured by all the best economists, including Paul Krugman, that such a thing would not come to pass.

So, what happened?

The short version is: You can pass a law saying you have to pay low-wage workers more, but you cannot pass a law that says you have to hire them in the first place, or that you cannot cut back on hours when the price of hourly labor goes up. As businesses responded to the new higher labor costs by reorganizing their processes in less labor-intensive ways (the classic examples here are the replacement of wait staff with computer screens in restaurants and the replacement of bank clerks with more sophisticated ATMs), the law that was supposed to increase low-wage workers’ incomes actually reduced them — substantially, by an average of $125 a month.

So why the legislators decide in the first place that a minimum-wage law was desirable, regardless of what wage was set? It was to price blacks and other minorities out of the job market.

Walter Williams, the famous economist and professor at George Mason, looked back on the railroad industry at around the end of the 19th century. Back then, as Dr. Williams points out, non-unionized blacks often had to accept a lower wage than their white counterparts due to racism of employers. So the white union had a plan: raise the minimum wage to price blacks out of work. One member of the racist, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen union, who called for the minimum wage increase, celebrated the removal of the “incentive for employing the Negro.”

Anyone who has studied the history of progressivism-liberalism-back-to-progressivism is entirely unsurprised by Prof. Williams' work. Read the whole thing.