Walter Williams: Minimum Wage, Maximum Dickhead

I really don't know who Walter Williams is, or thinks he is, but in a piece in the aptly-named Capitalist Magazine, entitled "Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly", he rails against minimum wage laws as being, among other things, "racist".

Williams, who judging from his photo, is African-American himself, really isn't clear as to why he believes that minimum wage laws are racist, aside from quoting some outdated report (that he wrote himself in 1989) on apartheid laws in South Africa, where the white-controlled unions were in support of minimum wage laws for blacks. (I know, it doesn't make any sense to me, either, and WW is no help).

But Williams, an obvious apologist for the excesses of capitalism (why else would he be writing in Capitalist Magazine?), cites a whole raft of US Labor Department statistics on the demographics of the minimum wage earner.

Well, you know the old saying about lies, damn lies and statistics. There's also another one: Statistics are like women of easy virtue--once you get 'em down you can do anything you want with them. For example, one statistic that appears on the Dept of Labor website is this one: "Among the four broad geographic regions, the West had the lowest proportion of hourly-paid workers with earnings at or below $5.15, at under 2 percent". This is literally true, but it does not take into account the inconvenient fact that the three most populous states of "The West", Washington, Oregon and California, all have state minimum wage amounts that are higher than the federally-mandated $5.15 -- the surprise is that the west has 2% of its workers who are criminally underpaid.

The capitalist-pig ruling class has been weeping and wailing and gnashing its teeth over the minimum wage law ever since it was first passed, way back during the New Deal. And every single time the minimum wage has been raised, they piss and moan about how many people will be forced out of work and onto the unemployment rolls, how it will be a drag on the economy, how it's oh-so-bad for poor people and women and minorities, blah blah blah.

Bullshit. While the Clinton administration was giving states the right to set their own minimum wage levels above the federal standard, this nation was experiencing an unprecedented economic boom that ended only when the so-called "business friendly" Bush Maladminstration started strangling the economy with its numerous misguided domestic and international policies.

Here's a sobering thought: Right now the federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. In the early 60s, when I was working at a pizza parlor making minimum wage, I was paid $1.25 an hour -- taking 42 years of inflation, into account that $1.25 is now worth $7.64. Which is more than two and a half dollars higher than the current federal minimum wage! (And while we're on the subject of inflation, gasoline was around 29 cents per gallon in 1963; that 29 cents is now equivalent to $1.77 -- which is what gas ought to cost; why is it over $3 per gallon?)

So, Walter Williams, you can piss up a rope. Shut the fuck up with all that sniveling because those poor employers are forced to pay an almost-living-wage to people who you think ought to be paid less than $4 an hour, because that's all their "productivity" warrants.

The next time you eat a meal at a restaurant, or stay in a hotel, or have a drink in your neighborhood bar, I hope you will be especially generous to the service-industry employees who take care of your needs, since they are -- by the very statistics you cite -- the most likely to be earning that exorbitantly high minimum wage.

But to be consistent with your own beliefs, maybe you shouldn't tip at all, since you apparently feel that they are already overpaid for the amount of "productivity" they demonstrate.

And I actually hope you don't, because I know firsthand what happens to deadbeat cheapskates who stiff the wait staff. It isn't pretty.