"Conservative" Christian intellectuals blame the market for what the state did

 

Unsplash/Pepi Stojanovski

President Biden’s proposal to raise the nation’s minimum wage to $15 per hour has been upstaged by his stimulus and infrastructure spending proposals, but the administration hasn't given up, and some well-meaning but historically and economically naïve Christians are on board.

All the missiles from economics launched against a minimum wage because it harms poor minorities bounce off the minds of statists (socialists, progressives, fascist, liberals, etc.) like Hamas rockets hitting Israel’s Iron Dome. Facts don’t move them. Consequences don’t faze them. Socialists reject the most developed of the social sciences, economics. Self-righteousness demands a minimum wage because they have declared it to be the moral thing to do regardless of the damage it will inflict.

Honestly, is it as moral as socialists claim? After all, minimum wages became popular in the early 20th century as the less violent way to promote eugenics. American progressives taught eugenics to Germans before Hitler and he merely took the ideology to its logical, violent conclusion. Progressives in the US wanted a non-violent way to suppress undesirable races and a minimum wage offered its services. 

In his review of Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard, Art Carden wrote, 

“Leonard recounts the ways in which Progressive Era economists argued that minimum wages were good policy precisely because they reduced employment opportunities for those workers. Social scientists in the thrall of the eugenics movement enthusiastically endorsed policies that excluded ‘unfit workers’ from the labor market lest those workers’ earnings enable them to continue polluting the gene pool.

“Foreigners and other non‐Caucasians could ‘under‐live’ American workers because they were accustomed to lower standards of living. Nonwhite workers would thus win the race to the bottom, ultimately culminating in ‘race suicide.’ In this view, Darwinian and competitive forces were dysgenic, meaning that unchecked reproduction among the fecund and ‘swarthy’ would overwhelm the genetically superior, leading ultimately to the degradation of the human race."

In his review of the standard textbook on economics of the US Progressive Era, Principles of Economics, by Frank W. Taussig (1917), Jeffrey Tucker wrote that the purpose of a minimum wage would be to regulate the labor market to exclude workers whose productivity was too low:

“Some people are simply unemployable, he [Taussig] says, for example ‘those who are helpless from cases irremediable’ due to ‘old age, infirmity, disabling accident’ and also those suffering from ‘congenital feebleness of body and charters, alcoholism, dissolute living […] irretrievable criminals and tramps.’

“This class, he opines, ‘must be stamped out’ and should not ‘be allowed to breed.’ Ideally, he says, we should ‘proceed to chloroform them once for all’ but that might have a bad look. Instead, ‘at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.’"

Tucker added that Princeton University’s Royal Meeker, Woodrow Wilson’s commissioner of labor, held the same ideology. “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work,” Meeker argued in 1910. 

“Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”

“If we are to maintain a race that is to be made up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups,’ Seager continued, ‘we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization.’”

One of the most famous socialists of the early 20th century, Sidney Webb, summed up the consensus of the time in his 1912 article The Economic Theory of the Minimum Wage:

“Legal Minimum Wage positively increases the productivity of the nation’s industry, by ensuring that the surplus of unemployed workmen shall be exclusively the least efficient workmen; or, to put it in another way, by ensuring that all the situations shall be filled by the most efficient operatives who are available.”

Who were the unemployable workers that progressives wanted to freeze out of the job market? They targeted blacks, Chinese, Hispanics, Eastern Europeans, and Jews. Progressive/socialist eugenicists were white supremacists who feared that inferior humans would destroy all that whites had built. Eugenicists were also responsible for Jim Crow laws.

What changed? Hitler followed Taussig’s advice but used a deadlier gas than chloroform. When Americans witnessed the concentration camps and gas chambers in Germany, any thought of oppressing minorities became repulsive. So socialists flipped the narrative and insisted that a minimum wage would benefit the same groups they had assaulted with it before the war. And they’re still pedaling that lie. Christians are required to care for the poor, not just to put on a political mask which pretends they do care, but actually advocates policies which were designed to harm them.

Why racists pushed, but theologians rejected, wage controls

 

In this Oct. 7, 2009 photo, a cashier gives change to a customer at Best Buy in Mountain View, Calif. | (Photo: AP Images / Paul Sakuma)

The minimum wage law is more popular today than ever. In my last post, I demonstrated the racist origins of modern minimum wage laws in the progressive eugenics movement of the early 20th century. Today, socialists ignore their earlier arguments that such laws hurt minorities and insist they help the poor. Every intervention into the market by the state benefits some at the expense of others. 

A minimum wage impacts mostly entry level, low skilled jobs, for the most part the jobs that teenagers with no work experience begin their careers in, such as hamburger flippers, ditch diggers, and shelf stockers. According to one of the best economists of the past 50 years, Dr. Thomas Sowell, minimum wage laws benefit whites. Who does it hurt? Minorities.

Dr. Thomas Sowell grew up poor in Harlem, New York but earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. Since 1980, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he serves as the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy.

Dr. Sowell is black. His race is important for two reasons: 1) Socialists insist that “lived experience” trumps all other knowledge, and 2) socialists insist that whites must remain silent when a black person speaks. In his 2007 book, Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, Dr. Sowell traced the impact of minimum wage laws:

“Another group disproportionately affected by minimum wage laws are members of unpopular racial or ethnic minority groups. Indeed, minimum wage laws were once advocated explicitly because of the likelihood that such laws would reduce or eliminate the competition of particular minorities, whether they were Japanese in Canada during the 1920s or blacks in the United States and South Africa during the same era. Such expressions of overt racial discrimination were both legal and socially accepted in all three countries at that time.
[...]
“The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. From the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable as the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 – all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly.

“The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The NIRA raised wages in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs.
[...]
“By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males.”

How should Christians respond to low-paying jobs such as those affected by the minimum wage? First, Christians should have an attitude of humility. No one knows what the right wage for entry level jobs should be. Church theologians kicked around Aristotle’s notion of a just price, including wages, for over a thousand years. Then in the Reformation they concluded that only God knows a just wage and he hasn’t revealed it to us. The closest humans can come is the wage arrived at in a free market in which neither party coerces the other.

So, if Walmart doesn’t coerce young job applicants and the applicants don’t pressure Walmart, the wage the two agree on is a just wage. Those Godly theologians rejected minimum wage laws because they knew such laws would cause greater unemployment among the poor and make them worse off than if they had kept the low-paying job. 

Second, responsibility for taking care of the poor falls upon the whole community, not just employers. Placing that burden only on employers advertises laziness and envy on the part of the community. If someone is trying to support a family with a low-wage job and can’t, the whole community must step up and provide the charity to support the family.

Debunking The Myth That Blacks Need To Be Surrounded By Whites To Succeed

The evangelical left complains about “systemic” racism in the US, using the lack of racial integration in churches as proof. Everyone on the left has read Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. It’s their “bible” on race relations. The authors claim that we live in a racialized society “wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships. Society bestows different economic, educational, political, and social rewards on groups based on racial categorizations.”

None of the evangelical left have read any of the books by Dr. Thomas Sowell or Dr. Walter Williams on the subject that debunk the assumptions and logic of Divided by Faith. Thomas Sowell’s latest book, Discrimination and Disparities, could be subtitled, A Response to Divided by Faith.

For example, the left claims that the way US citizens have sorted themselves in housing, schooling and jobs is proof of racism. Those “scholars” make the unjustified assumption that races would mix in a random way if no racism existed. But history shows us that people have always chosen to live with those most like themselves if allowed to do so. The left has no problem with the Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Iranians, Hispanics, Koreans, Arabs and other ethnic groups clustering with others like them.

Book on race advertises failure of state programs

Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith rocked the white evangelical world when it came out in 2000. It appealed to the evangelical’s love of wool shirts and launched a new genre of books and articles promoting white evangelical guilt over racism. In 2013, Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith was the booster rocket to keep the movement in orbit.

 Structural racism in the US in spite of the Civil Rights movement horrified the authors of Divided by Faith. By structural racism they mean free markets. They wanted to tax the rich at higher rates and redistribute it to poor. That such taxation would hurt rich blacks and that most of the poor are white (though the poverty rate among blacks is higher) didn't enter their calculations. 

Frustrated by the white evangelical insistence on individual responsibility and personal evangelism, they determined to move white evangelicals away from their fixation on the individual and toward solving structural issues through the government. Their solution was for white evangelicals to get to know blacks personally by having them to dinner and integrating churches. They reasoned that if whites could know black people well enough they would become as socialist as the authors. 

White supremacy is part of the left, not the right

The white supremacist organizers of the tragedy in Charlottesville, WV last week called their rally “Unite the Right.” That title reveals a deep ignorance of history and sorry reasoning skills. Racism has never been part of any definition of the right by any leader of the right in history.

There are two divisions within the right and left today – economic and social. Economically, the left is socialist and demands state control of the economy; the right favors free markets. The free market right opposed slavery in the 19th century, which caused the left, socialists who favored slavery, to give their discipline the name of the “dismal science.” See Wikipedia’s article on Thomas Carlyle.

Leaders of the left have often claimed that slavery was the natural consequence of capitalism, in spite of the historical evidence that all of the leaders of capitalism opposed slavery. Capitalists have always and at all times insisted that the only job of the state is to protect the life, liberty and property of every person equally. The left knows this but doesn’t want the public to know it. So they lie. Slavery was not a market failure or the logical result of capitalism. Slavery was the largest failure of government in the history of the West.

The left's long lingering history of racism

Listen to the news about the immigration of Syrians to Europe and you think free marketeers are racists because the media labels opponents of immigration the “extreme right.” After all, promoters of freedom are positioned to the right while socialists are on the left, right? But the historical facts tell a different story.

Economists of the mid-nineteenth century opposed slavery. The greatest, David Ricardo, was a Jew and knew something about racism and oppression. The advocates of slavery opposed the economists. Thomas Carlyle, a socialist, dubbed economics the “dismal science” because the freedom that economists demanded would create a “dismal” world in which white people were equal with the “inferior” races, such as the people of Africa.

Leftist regressives, who called themselves Progressives, invented the truly dismal science of eugenics in order to suppress the population of minorities in the UK and US and force them to reduce their birthrates. They introduced the minimum wage in the US to prevent minorities such as Jews, Africans, Chinese, Mexicans and Native Americans from getting jobs. Regressives assumed that if those minorities couldn’t get jobs then they wouldn’t marry and have children. For details check out Princeton scholar Thomas C. Leonard's book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era.