The minimum wage is often touted as a compassionate measure meant to help poorer Americans earn a decent wage. But looking at the racist, elitist origins of the minimum wage in both America and other countries can help clarify that the minimum wage was specifically meant to sabotage the working class, not help them.
One observation that I have made for years (along with many other Americans who operate on common sense) is that raising the minimum wage always ends up putting people out of jobs and raising prices, meaning that a higher minimum wage is obviously a self-defeating measure. For those who are fired, it’s a disaster; for those who keep their jobs only to face higher prices, it’s not the marvelous income increase that was promised. Not only that, it excludes young people, the inexperienced, and the elderly from jobs that they used to have. Who wants to pay a 16-year-old $15 an hour to flip burgers? In other words, the minimum wage actually decreases the employed labor force.
It turns out this is not an unintentional side effect of the minimum wage, if Jeffrey A. Tucker’s research is to be believed. In a commentary piece for The Epoch Times, Brownstone Institute founder and president Tucker uncovered the eugenics-poisoned origins of the minimum wage. He pointed to certain problematic results of the minimum wage, such as the fact that 60% of young people aged 16 to 19 were in the workforce in the second half of the last century, while only 36% of that same age group can say the same today (of course, that is not solely due to minimum wage, but the latter is a factor). “The whole idea of the minimum wage was to exclude people from the workforce. Worse, it was meant to starve the undesirable populations out of mainstream life. This is the dream and ambition that was made very obvious from the writings of its earliest proponents,” Tucker argued.
He provided multiple quotes to support his argument. For instance, Royal Meeker — economist and commissioner of labor to white supremacist Woodrow Wilson — argued in 1910, “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work. 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.” Many eugenicists of the day specifically targeted non-whites (especially blacks), non-Anglo whites (including Italians and Irish), anyone they considered “unemployable” or “feeble-minded,” women, and children. Economist Frank Taussig declared the allegedly “unemployable” should “simply be stamped out,” or at least “segregated.”
The famed Fabian socialist Sidney Webb was as blunt as anyone 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…
“What would be the result of a Legal Minimum Wage on the employer’s persistent desire to use boy labor, girl labor, married women’s labor, the labor of old men, of the feeble-minded, of the decrepit and broken-down invalids and all the other alternatives to the engagement of competent male adult workers at a full Standard Rate? ... To put it shortly, all such labor is parasitic on other classes of the community, and is at present employed in this way only because it is parasitic.”
Webb even explicitly avowed his genocidal goals: “The unemployable, to put it bluntly, do not and cannot under any circumstances earn their keep. What we have to do with them is to see that as few as possible of them are produced.” Tucker added his own opinion: “Whatever the intentions, the effects are still the same. It doesn’t raise wages for the poor. It excludes them from the job market.”
The minimum wage remains, after the early 20th-century eugenics movement has passed. Or has it? Leftists openly advocate for fewer children and population control now. Democrats are maniacally devoted to abortion, which disproportionately kills black babies in America. Humans are the disease driving the planet into a climate crisis of apocalyptic proportions, the woke liars screech. The U.S. political establishment seems to love funding war with an irrational passion. Transhumanists like Elon Musk dream of “improving” humans or engineering babies in factories instead of allowing natural conception.
Did the eugenics movement really die down? Or did it just adopt new and more deceptive language — and is it more successful than ever before? Perhaps the minimum wage, instead of being a relic of racist eugenics past, is simply a long-term successful tool of the still-thriving elitist eugenicists.
