Boss
Take a Memo:
Most of you, like myself, have learned about the Great Depression through the prism of public education. We were taught that FDR came into office, implemented his New Deal policies and saved the day... Right? Or, at least that's the way it is portrayed. The actual reality is quite different. As we get older and go to college, we are able to read different accounts of what happened and we learn that many of his policies actually prolonged the Great Depression. In fact, many argue that it might not have ever been a "Great" depression if not for some of the things he did early on. Some have even speculated that if not for WWII, we may have never pulled ourselves out of the death spiral we were in. All of this stuff is highly debatable but I want to focus on just one policy that FDR enacted which is still with us today, and is still being paraded around by Progressives as something great and wonderful... The Federal Minimum Wage mandate.
It is interesting to note what FDR said on the day he signed this legislation into law. He said: "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." That was June 16, 1933. Some 83 years later, we have Progressive politicians out there screaming the same line. So, why has this policy not effectively worked to produce what was promised 83 years ago? The Progressives will say that we just haven't raised it enough. So we ask them, how much do you think we need to raise it? They tell us and we raise it. A few years go by and we're once again having the debate and the Progressives are again claiming we didn't raise it enough. For 83 years, we've chased the carrot on the stick in hopes of attaining this elusive "living wage" that will finally solve all our problems. It never does.
In her book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, author Amity Shlaes makes a revealing and scathing discovery behind the idea of the minimum wage. This is the basis of what I want to talk about here today. While we have always been taught to believe the minimum wage was FDR's attempt to force companies to pay employees a decent wage, that's not the whole truth. Yes, there were some companies exploiting the conditions at the time to profit on the backs of desperate people. We've all watched Grapes of Wrath, we all know the horror stories... Progressives are good at emoting the worst case scenarios. But there were also people like Henry Ford who paid his employees well above the national average because he wanted them to be able to afford his product.
So what is the dirty little secret the Progressives fail to mention? Well, you have to remember, after the stock market crashed in 1929, millions and millions of people were laid off. Unemployment skyrocketed across the nation. This literally affected just about every family in the country. And if you weren't a laborer who earned a paycheck, you were probably a farmer and your plight was even worse. Because of the protectionist tariffs applied by Hoover, a tariff war had devastated agriculture and then came the droughts. So everyone was in bad shape across the board. Also keep in mind, we were not a very homogeneous society back then, there was a great deal of blatant racism and discrimination. Because of the lean financial situation, a lot of capitalists were looking for the cheapest way to provide labor and they found the black man was not afraid to work long hours for meager wages. They seemed to be much more productive for the low wages they demanded... more bang for the buck.
Now here is a trivia question for you... When was the last time black unemployment was lower than white unemployment in the US? Progressives are good at feeding you the propaganda that blacks have always had historically higher unemployment than whites, but that's not true. Shlaes points out, according to the 1930 census data, black unemployment was lower than white unemployment. The implementation of the Federal Minimum Wage was quite simply a measure to improve employment for whites at the expense of blacks. The year following the implementation of this law, we find black unemployment was double that of whites. Companies were not forced to hire black people, there were no laws protecting them from discrimination at the time. So when faced with the prospect of either hiring a black man or white man at the same mandated wage, they typically went with the white man. The Minimum Wage, so proudly promoted by Progressives to this day, was an abhorrently racist policy designed to improve employment opportunity for whites over blacks and minorities.
And just as in days past, the insistence on increasing the minimum wage is doing nothing for the unskilled worker, the low-education minorities, the working poor. When a capitalist is faced with having to hire people at a higher rate, they are going to naturally look at the more-skilled, higher-educated prospects first. And the first people to get the ax when they have to cut jobs are those who are lacking in those areas. So even though we now have all kinds of laws against discrimination based on race, the minimum wage continues to be a racist policy that ensures better job opportunity for skilled whites over lesser-skilled blacks and minorities. All the while, we are being pumped full of lies and propaganda from the Progressives.
It is interesting to note what FDR said on the day he signed this legislation into law. He said: "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." That was June 16, 1933. Some 83 years later, we have Progressive politicians out there screaming the same line. So, why has this policy not effectively worked to produce what was promised 83 years ago? The Progressives will say that we just haven't raised it enough. So we ask them, how much do you think we need to raise it? They tell us and we raise it. A few years go by and we're once again having the debate and the Progressives are again claiming we didn't raise it enough. For 83 years, we've chased the carrot on the stick in hopes of attaining this elusive "living wage" that will finally solve all our problems. It never does.
In her book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, author Amity Shlaes makes a revealing and scathing discovery behind the idea of the minimum wage. This is the basis of what I want to talk about here today. While we have always been taught to believe the minimum wage was FDR's attempt to force companies to pay employees a decent wage, that's not the whole truth. Yes, there were some companies exploiting the conditions at the time to profit on the backs of desperate people. We've all watched Grapes of Wrath, we all know the horror stories... Progressives are good at emoting the worst case scenarios. But there were also people like Henry Ford who paid his employees well above the national average because he wanted them to be able to afford his product.
So what is the dirty little secret the Progressives fail to mention? Well, you have to remember, after the stock market crashed in 1929, millions and millions of people were laid off. Unemployment skyrocketed across the nation. This literally affected just about every family in the country. And if you weren't a laborer who earned a paycheck, you were probably a farmer and your plight was even worse. Because of the protectionist tariffs applied by Hoover, a tariff war had devastated agriculture and then came the droughts. So everyone was in bad shape across the board. Also keep in mind, we were not a very homogeneous society back then, there was a great deal of blatant racism and discrimination. Because of the lean financial situation, a lot of capitalists were looking for the cheapest way to provide labor and they found the black man was not afraid to work long hours for meager wages. They seemed to be much more productive for the low wages they demanded... more bang for the buck.
Now here is a trivia question for you... When was the last time black unemployment was lower than white unemployment in the US? Progressives are good at feeding you the propaganda that blacks have always had historically higher unemployment than whites, but that's not true. Shlaes points out, according to the 1930 census data, black unemployment was lower than white unemployment. The implementation of the Federal Minimum Wage was quite simply a measure to improve employment for whites at the expense of blacks. The year following the implementation of this law, we find black unemployment was double that of whites. Companies were not forced to hire black people, there were no laws protecting them from discrimination at the time. So when faced with the prospect of either hiring a black man or white man at the same mandated wage, they typically went with the white man. The Minimum Wage, so proudly promoted by Progressives to this day, was an abhorrently racist policy designed to improve employment opportunity for whites over blacks and minorities.
And just as in days past, the insistence on increasing the minimum wage is doing nothing for the unskilled worker, the low-education minorities, the working poor. When a capitalist is faced with having to hire people at a higher rate, they are going to naturally look at the more-skilled, higher-educated prospects first. And the first people to get the ax when they have to cut jobs are those who are lacking in those areas. So even though we now have all kinds of laws against discrimination based on race, the minimum wage continues to be a racist policy that ensures better job opportunity for skilled whites over lesser-skilled blacks and minorities. All the while, we are being pumped full of lies and propaganda from the Progressives.
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