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Swordsmyth
07-27-2017, 09:03 PM
The worst part is that while almost everyone who advocates for the minimum-wage hikes today is under the misguided view that they are helping the poorest of the poor, the progressive progenitors of the minimum-wage idea in the early 20th century advocated for it specifically because they wanted to hurt the poor—by making them even poorer.
No, you didn't read that sentence incorrectly.
As economic historian Thomas C. Leonard noted in "Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era (https://www.princeton.edu/%7Etleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf)," a study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2005, the fact that minimum-wage laws actually increase unemployment among poor, low-wage workers was perfectly well understood by the turn-of-the-century progressive reformers who advocated for them. More than that, the fact that they increase unemployment was actually seen as a key feature of those laws. As Leonard explains:

"Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics, believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service [of] ridding the labor force of the 'unemployable.' Sidney and Beatrice Webb put it plainly: 'With regard to certain sections of the population [the 'unemployable'], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.' '[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,' Sidney Webb opined in the Journal of Political Economy, 'the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.' A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants and also by removing from employment the 'unemployable,' who, thus identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized."
Did you catch that? By the logic of eugenics—the true religion of the progressives and their ilk—the poor must be made completely unemployable so they can be made wards of the state, segregated, and ultimately sterilized. After all, they had committed the crime of being born with "inferior genes"—or, in the pseudoscientific gobbledygook of that era, with "defective protoplasm." Minimum-wage laws were actually designed to keep the poor out of the work force specifically so they would be at the mercy of the eugenicists.
https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://www.corbettreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/freesoup.jpg (https://www.corbettreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/freesoup.jpg)
As shocking as this philosophy may be to our modern sensibilities, living as we do in an era where eugenical ideas have gone out of fashion and must now be masked by a veneer of kindness and good intentions, the black-and-white statements of the early minimum-wage advocates leaves no doubt what these laws were intended to achieve.
Take Henry Rogers Seager, a Columbia economist and president of the American Association for Labor Legislation, who wrote a key paper on the minimum-wage law in 1913. As Leonard relates in his "Retrospectives" article:

"Seager wrote: 'The operation of the minimum wage requirement would merely extend the definition of defectives to embrace all individuals, who even after having received special training, remain incapable of adequate self-support.' Seager made clear what should happen to those who, even after remedial training, could not earn the legal minimum: 'If we are to maintain a race that is to be made of up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization...'."
Or take Woodrow Wilson's Commissioner of Labor Statistics, a Princeton economist by the unlikely name of Royal Meeker. Of him, Leonard notes:

"Meeker preferred a wage floor because it would disemploy unfit workers and thereby enable their culling from the work force. 'It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work,' argued Meeker. '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.'"
This is the real history of the motive behind the fight for the minimum-wage—a history not even known, let alone understood or acknowledged, by the well-meaning dupes of the crypto-eugenic, centrally-planned technocratic slave state of our era. The entire point of the minimum wage—originally made explicitly, now implicitly—has always been to remove the poorest people from the labor pool in order to better mark them out for sterilization (or today, abortion (https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-271-planned-parenthood-exposed/)) and, ultimately, elimination.

More at: https://steemit.com/news/@corbettreport/the-dark-truth-about-the-minimum-wage

Swordsmyth
07-27-2017, 09:07 PM
The Return Of Eugenics? Tennessee Judge Issues Sterilization Program For Inmates (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?513210-The-Return-Of-Eugenics-Tennessee-Judge-Issues-Sterilization-Program-For-Inmates)