Jim Crow 2.0: How the Minimum Wage Became the Democrat Party’s Favorite Racist law of the Left.

To use Joy Reid's favorite phrase...

 American Free News Network   

"The Great Society welfare architecture: collapsed Black two-parent households from over 80 percent to below 30 percent in a single generation, after two hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow failed to accomplish the same thing. Racist in outcome regardless of stated intent, and defended for sixty straight years."

. . . "EXHIBIT ONE: THE ORIGINAL SIN — BUILT BY RACISTS, FOR RACISTS —

"Here is what does not make it into the civics textbook, including — I will admit this uncomfortably — the one that sat on shelves before I wrote my own.

"The minimum wage was not invented by union heroes fighting for the little guy. It was invented by progressive eugenicists who said, in print, under their own names, that they wanted it to price certain people out of the labor market entirely. Princeton economist Thomas Leonard spent a career documenting this so thoroughly that the modern left has simply chosen not to read him. The word these progressive economists used for the people they wanted priced out was “unemployables.” When they wrote “unemployables” in 1913, they meant Black Americans, recent immigrants, and the disabled. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, intellectual royalty of the progressive movement, called it “social cleansing” in their own writing. Not my word. Theirs.

Union leadership of that era did not even bother with euphemism. Minimum wage rules, they said, removed “the incentive for employing the Negro.” That is a direct quote from a primary source, not my paraphrase, not a hostile interpretation. It is sitting in the historical record for anyone who wants to check my work.

"Then came the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — a federal wage floor on government construction jobs, pushed through by Southern Democrats and Northern union bosses who were furious that Black construction workers kept winning federal contracts by working for market wages. Texas Congressman Martin Dies said it on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, not in a diary, not in a private letter — on the floor, in the Congressional Record: “you cannot prescribe the same wages for the Black man as the White man.” The bill passed.

"The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — the law that actually created the federal minimum wage — excluded agricultural workers and domestic servants. Historian Ira Katznelson documented, at exhausting length, that this was the specific price Southern Democrats demanded for their votes, because agricultural and domestic work is where Black labor was concentrated in the Jim Crow South. A wage floor that carves a hole exactly the shape of the population you want to keep controllable is not an accident of drafting. It is the whole point of the drafting.

Milton Friedman — Nobel Prize, 1976 — called the minimum wage “the most anti-Negro law on our statute books.” 1966. In print. And today the party that built that law stands at a podium and calls raising it “racial justice.”

"Say that combination out loud a few times. A law engineered by eugenicists to exclude Black workers, defended for ninety-plus years by the Democratic Party, and rebranded — with a completely straight face — as the moral high ground. If a Republican had designed a policy this way, it would be a chapter in every AP U.S. History textbook printed since 1975. Because Democrats designed it, it is a “living wage” bumper sticker.

"That is racist. Not “has racist optics.” Racist in its founding text, by its own founders’ own words." . . .  Much, much more...