What Christians need to know about minimum wage laws and white supremacy

 

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.

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. 

The father of Nazism and ANTIFA violence and what it means for the future

The violence of the demonstration by neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, West Virginia recently shocked the mainstream media because of the media’s ignorance of history. We have seen it before with the anarchists at the turn of the last century, in the clashes between Nazis and Communists in Germany before WWII and in the student riots of 1968 in the US and Europe. They all have the same ideological father in George Sorel according to Mises who wrote in The Anti-Capitalist Mentality in 1956:

The most pernicious ideology of the last sixty years was George Sorel's syndicalism and his enthusiasm for the action directe. Generated by a frustrated French intellectual, it soon captivated the literati of all European countries. It was a major factor in the radicalization of all subversive movements. It influenced French royalism, militarism and anti-Semitism. It played an important role in the evolution of Russian Bolshevism, Italian Fascism and the German youth movement which finally resulted in the development of Nazism. It transformed political parties intent upon winning through electoral campaigns into factions which relied upon the organization of armed bands. It brought into discredit representative government and "bourgeois security," and preached the gospel both of civil and of foreign war. Its main slogan was: violence and again violence. The present state of European affairs is to a great extent an outcome of the prevalence of Sorel's teachings.

The intellectuals were the first to hail the ideas of Sorel; they made them popular. But the tenor of Sorelism was obviously anti-intellectual. He was opposed to cool reasoning and sober deliberation. What counts for Sorel is solely the deed, viz., the act of violence for the sake of violence. Fight for a myth whatever this myth may mean, was his advice. "If you place yourself on this ground of myths, you are proof against any kind of critical refutation." What a marvelous philosophy, to destroy for the sake of destruction! Do not talk, do not reason, kill! Sorel rejects the "intellectual effort" even of the literary champions of revolution. The essential aim of the myth is "to prepare people to fight for the destruction of what exists."

According to the Wikipedia article on him,

Sorel denounced the war and in 1917 praised the Russian Revolution, which was later printed in an official Soviet Union publication, Russian Soviet Government Bureau, calling Lenin "the greatest theoretician of socialism since Marx and a statesman whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great.”[12] He wrote numerous small pieces for Italian newspapers defending the Bolsheviks. Less than one year later in March 1921, Sorel turned his praise towards a rising Fascist leader in Italy, writing that “Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin…”[13]

Zeev Sternhell mentions frequently Sorel [33] as one of the men who led the way to the fusion of the left-wing revisionists and of the right-wing ultranationalists into what later became fascism....Thus, the workers must return to strikes and violence as their main political tool, so Sorel says. This gives the workers a sense of unity, a return to dignity, and weakens the dangerous and mediocre middle-class in their struggle for power, and their attack on capitalism.

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.