Tuesday, February 12, 2019

‘We’ Did Not Create the ‘Mighty Middle Class’: ‘I’ Did


In a January 2019 editorial, The $15 wage: Reaffirming what New Jersey stands for, the New Jersey Star-Ledger lauded Nj politicians for enacting a phased-in $15 minimum wage. What’s important here is not the rise in the minimum wage, bad as that is. What caught my eye is the Star-Ledger’s rationalization for it.

This historic act, made by people who value the dignity of work, will enable nearly a million more New Jerseyans to soon make something that approximates a living wage.

Our state took a prodigious step toward addressing decades of economic injustice, and all it took was for our elected leaders to affirm what we believe in. For centuries, when we saw someone who needed a hand up, we had the compassion and wisdom to do it without overdoing it. We welcomed immigrants from every corner of the world and brought them into the circle of opportunity. We took the poor and made them middle class. We took the middle class and made it mighty.

I left these comments, somewhat expanded and edited for clarity:

“When we saw someone who needed a hand up, we had the compassion and wisdom to do it”

There’s a fundamental difference between a voluntary ‘hand up’ and a government-forced hand out. The first is compassion, the second injustice. Notice the heartless collectivist repudiation of individual self-reliance; “We took the poor and made them middle class. We took the middle class and made it mighty.” No, “We” didn’t. The middle class stands for individual productiveness and upward mobility, achieved through individual effort and voluntary association based on mutual consent. Each individual earned it. The collectivist worldview of the Star-Ledger and its ilk leaves no room for the value of the individual. It’s all about some mystical “We” to which each of us is only a helpless cog. But in fact, “We” didn’t create the middle class. “I” created the middle class.

Collectivism is the weapon of the statist who imagines that he can simply legislate a “living wage.” There is no economic justice in getting a wage forced on your employer, the job creator. There is no dignity in an unearned “living wage”. There is no dignity in losing a job, or being unable to find a job, because your skill level doesn’t yet warrant the $15 some politician mandates. And if you manage to keep your job at the higher coerced wage, there is certainly no dignity is profiting at the expense of someone else’s being forced into unemployment by the same law that “gave” you your raise.

The economic destructiveness of price controls is well-known and undisputed. Force up the price of something, including of labor, and you get less of it--in this case, fewer jobs and fewer sustainable businesses. But minimum wage laws are also immoral, because they not only force businesses to pay more than voluntarily agreed to, but deny entry level and low-skilled workers the right to accept a job at less, thus denying them access to the economic opportunity that the lower rungs of the “economic ladder of success” offers.

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Once again we can see the “You didn’t build that” weapon that Obama set up. The worst thing Obama did was to establish a philosophical springboard for American socialists to complete the task of fundamentally transforming America into a socialist state. If “you didn’t build that”--if “We” made the middle class--then created wealth is a tribal product. If wealth is due to tribal “effort”, rather than at root an individual effort, then there is no reason that the tribe’s--i.e., society’s--wealth should not be controlled and distributed by the tribal chiefs, the government.

If you don’t understand how markets work--how wealth is created and distributed by individuals contracting, collaborated, and trading---and how the infinitely intricate price mechanism sorts out who built and thus deserves what--then you will always be susceptible to the kind of poison Obama has fed us. Unfortunately, too many Americans buy into what is essentially the savages view of wealth as a tribal product. Too many Americans either are ignorant or, worse, know better but buy into the “you didn’t build that”/“We built the Middle Class” view for their own sinister reasons. Welcome to a socialist America.

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