A Socialism Spill on Aisle 9
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The working class in the United States has no
better champion than Barack Obama. Like most
champions of the working class, he has never
actually worked at a real job and instead divided
his time between academia, non-profits and politics
which explains his current work ethic in which he
tries to get a speech in between every two
vacations..
The progressive law professors, who are currently
the only thing standing between the working class
and the abyss, at least according to other
progressive professors, not only haven’t worked for
a living, but don't know what working for a living
entails and don't even understand the concept. Other
things that they don't understand include personal
responsibility, consequences, elementary arithmetic
and human free will.
That last one never fails to throw them for a loop.
No sooner do they pass some comprehensive plan
intended to ameliorate a terrible problem then they
discover that the working people have made a hash
out of it. But they never despair because they are
certain that there is no progressive solution that
cannot be fixed by an even more comprehensive
progressive solution.
ObamaCare isn't working? Go Single Payer? There are
no more doctors? Outlaw illness. People are still
getting sick? Fine them for sabotaging progressive
medicine. Like the island whose colonial overlords
tried to solve their rat problem by dropping snakes
only to discover that it now had a snake problem,
progressives always have solutions. The trouble is
that they never understand the problem.
The protectors of the working class, currently
presiding over a country where over 90 million
adults are not in the workforce, keep dropping
snakes on the island without ever figuring out why
so many people are dying of snakebites. B.O. or
Before Obama, 63 percent of working age Americans
had jobs. Today it's 58 percent. And Obama is trying
to see if he can drop the country below the 50 mark.
The latest snake that Obama is trying to drop on the
island is a minimum wage hike. A minimum wage hike
sounds like a great idea to a progressive professor
who, like Marie Antoinette, wonders why the poor
can't just eat cake during a bread shortage. If the
poor aren't making enough money, just raise their
salaries. If their salaries go up, they'll have more
money and the government will be able to spend more
money creating jobs that it can then tax using a
magic perpetual motion machine.
The first casualty of the minimum wage hike will be
some 500,000 jobs. While just 19 percent of the
minimum wage increase will go to those below the
poverty line, the same isn't true of that 500,000.
The most disposable workers also tend to be the
poorest in the new economy. They are the first ones
out the door when a small business comes up against
the ObamaCare employer mandate or a minimum wage
hike. It doesn't take much to push them out from
full time to part time and from part time to the
unemployment line and from the unemployment line to
permanent unemployment.
Purge six figures worth of workers and suddenly
income inequality becomes an even bigger problem
that the Harvard and Yale Friends of the Working
Class can use to run for reelection. It doesn't
occur to progressive professors slash community
organizers that the living standard of the poor is
not defined by an infographic comparing their income
to Bill Gates' spectacles budget or George Soros'
villain lair complete with lasers and piranhas.
It isn't even defined by their salary, but by the
buying power of that salary.
A salary is just a number. It was once possible to
buy a meal for a dime and a politician for a hundred
dollars. Today dinner with a politician will cost
you that hundred and the politician may cost you a
hundred thousand.
The businesses that minimum wage workers depend
on are peopled with other minimum wage workers. Even
assuming that the pay hike were employment neutral,
which it most certainly is not, it would rebalance
once the businesses they patronize pass on the pay
hike as a price hike. And then before you know it
everyone is making more money that still buys about
the same amount that their old paychecks did.
Income inequality is class warfare, a subject of
interest to Marxist professors and sober news
anchors who are deeply concerned about the words
scrolling across their teleprompters, but of very
little relevance to the price of a loaf of bread, a
gallon of milk and a pound of ground beef. The
prices of basic staples have risen sharply under the
Friend of the Working Class in Washington. While he
dines on faux Wagyu beef at White House dinners, the
working class victims of his class warfare are
standing in Aisle 9 trying to assemble a puzzle that
consists of their upcoming paycheck, a Payday loan
and a grocery list.
The woman weighting a can of beans in one hand and
her pocketbook in the other trying to decide what
she can afford to take home doesn't need income
equality with a Harvard Law prof. What she needs a
living standard that will allow her to afford what
working Americans used to be able to afford. A
minimum wage hike is a blunt instrument that looks
good until it puts her out of a job or until she
comes back to Aisle 9 and sees that the price hikes
match her new paycheck.
Progressives don't particularly care about the woman
in Aisle 9. They eat up hard luck stories on NPR and
CNN the way that their great-grandparents marveled
at hunger in Africa because of the way that it makes
them feel, not because they understand how those
people live or care about them. They use them to
feel charitable and to win elections. Each
progressive solution makes life worse in Aisle 9,
but they never visit Aisle 9. If they did, they
would outlaw the other half of the products in it
that they haven't already outlawed through various
contrived legalisms.
In the Venezuelan Aisle 9, mobs are fighting over
powdered milk in government stores in a country that
has 85 percent of the oil reserves in the region.
Everyone is entitled to powdered milk and other
price controlled staples. But being entitled to
something doesn't mean that you can get it. Not
until the government seizes control of the entire
production process of powdered milk and then when
that is done, no one will ever drink powdered milk
again.
The path to Venezuela's Aisle 9 is surprisingly
similar to America's Aisle 9. It began with a series
of blunt force measures that were meant to address
the standard of living problem in a country with
runaway inflation. Governments can raise wages or
lower food prices, but they can't enforce the
availability of food or jobs and they can't control
how the working class will work around the
consequences of foodless government supermarkets and
minimum wage jobs that have been priced out of the
marketplace.
Venezuela's Friend of the Working Class, Hugo
Chavez, kicked the golden bucket with an estimated
net worth of 2 billion dollars. The Friends of the
Working Class are also doing comfortably well in
D.C. where it pays to be an expert on poverty and an
advocate for helping the working class by adding 12
million illegal aliens to the job market with
illegal alien amnesty, shutting down jobs with
environmental regulations and freeing the people
still working from that dreaded "job lock".
For the Washington Friends of the Working Class
drifting from one cocktail party and fundraising
dinner to another, the minimum wage hike is their
latest gimmick for winning in 2016. They are as
ignorant of the lives of the waiters who bring them
their Wagyu beef and the vagaries of a working class
budget as they are of Ancient Sanskrit or the
geography of the moon.
The working class that they preach about is an
unreal abstract to them that is reducible to their
party, their movement and their agenda. Their
legislation is blessed by their empathy. It does not
occur to them that their programs can backfire and
that unintended consequences follow from confusing
magical thinking with hard numbers. In Aisle 9,
things are simple and inflexible, but in politics
and academia everything is subjective.
Weighing a can of food in your hands that you need
but cannot afford wonderfully focuses the mind on
the real, but at the cocktail parties of the Friends
of the Working Class, everything is wonderfully
unreal. Life is full of possibilities, vacations,
conferences and elections. There are no hard facts,
only ideas and slogans. Everything and everyone does
what you want them to.
Like The Great Gatsby's Tom and Daisy, the
progressive law professors and community organizers
inhabit a "vast carelessness" of conferences and
cocktail parties from which they emerge to
carelessly smash things up before retreating back
into it with no real awareness of what they have
done and a certainty that the people on Aisle 9
whose lives they have smashed up ought to be
grateful to them.