Saturday, February 22, 2014

The Real Reason the Right Is Against Raising the Minimum Wage

 
Massa promise not to whip us tonight.

Conservatives in general and the tea-party conservatives specifically stand for economic policies that wear a free-market mask. They repeat ad nauseum, "Let the markets decide." At their core, they don't believe in setting a minimum wage at all. Let the markets decide!

What they really, really want is quite different. Yes, they want the markets to decide, but they're really betting that the markets will deliver to them what they lust for. And that's the creation of a new slave class.

The slave class, of course, is already successfully created. It's a mix of Hispanics, blacks, and whites who have never gotten out of the low-skill, low-wage trap and aren't likely to anytime soon, given current policy.

And that's just where conservatives want them to stay. In a nutshell,
  • The GOP will fight against raising the minimum wage because we don't have to give slaves a living wage. They're slaves, for Christ's sake.
  • The GOP will fight to prevent immigration reform, one, because they don't want their slave class voting (them out of office) and, two, they like Hispanics right where they are, a disenfranchised minority that will work for slave wages.
  • Why accidentally help blacks? The GOP doesn't want them to vote, and the GOP doesn't want them to escape the low-wage trap. They might leave the urban core and move to the suburbs, where, increasingly, the jobs are. Heaven forbid!
  • And poor whites? Aren't they sort of black?
Take a clear look at what the Republicans have been doing and advocating. Then convince me that they aren't in favor of a new status quo that's more like the old status quo just before the Civil Right Act of 1964. Only with more Hispanics in the mix and a newly acquired disdain for white trash.

Where am I wrong?

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