We are boarding an American Airlines flight to return to Northern Virginia. I expect Dudley will be pleased to see us upon arrival.
Below is an article concerning the stupidity of the minimum wage. I have opined on this before (many times, but Mr. Cardoza’s article explains the stupidity of the policy in detail).
There is also an article on the abuse of language in order to deceive. A particular pet peeve of mine.
Enjoy.
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Minimum Wage is Maximum Folly
Advocates of minimum wage present the policy as a means to uplift low-income workers. But for more than a century, it has steadily produced outcomes starkly at odds with this goal.
BY: Jim Cardoza, The American Thinker (May 7, 2026).
Progressive lawmakers in Washington, D.C., recently introduced legislation that would increase the federal minimum wage to $25 per hour. But rather than discuss the merits of an increase, our representatives would be wise to debate the scheme itself.
Advocates of minimum wage present the policy as a means to uplift low-income workers. But for more than a century, it has steadily produced outcomes starkly at odds with this goal. It is far more than an economic policy. It is a statement on our society’s underlying assumptions about human freedom, responsibility, and the proper limits of government power. When examined honestly, minimum wage reveals an unsettling truth: symbolic compassion often produces actual misery, and the people paying the highest price are those least able to bear it.
Let’s look at how this policy originated. The popular narrative claims the minimum wage was created to protect low-skill workers from exploitation. But the historical record tells a very different story — one so politically inconvenient that it has been almost entirely erased from public discussion.
In the early 20th century, Progressive-era reformers in the United States, Canada, and Australia supported minimum-wage laws explicitly as a tool to exclude undersired workers from the labor market. These undesired workers were usually minorities, immigrants, women, or the poor. The logic was simple: raise the cost of competitive labor. After all, the appeal of hiring unionized white men is greatly reduced when a black laborer, an immigrant, or a woman is available to do the job at a far lower wage.
The intention was not hidden. Economists and policymakers wrote openly about the need to prevent “inferior” workers from “undercutting” others through their offer to work for lower pay. Early advocates were quite clear that raising the cost of hiring low-skill workers would reduce their value, making them less employable. They supported the legislation for precisely this reason.
Milton Friedman noted bluntly, “The minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying employers must discriminate against people with low skills.” Walter E. Williams went even further, calling it one of the few government policies whose historical intent and modern consequences aligned perfectly: it reduced employment among low-skill workers, disproportionately harming minorities.
Minimum wage is a policy born not of generosity, but of exclusion. Its intent was never to uplift. It was always to restrict.
A minimum wage is not merely an economic regulation; it is a legal prohibition. It forbids consenting adults from entering into a work agreement that both find mutually beneficial. If a young person wishes to work for $10 an hour to gain experience — and an employer wishes to hire him at that wage — that transaction is outlawed.
The assumption behind such a law is that individuals do not know what is in their best interest and that government overlords do.
In a free society, there is no reason that third parties should dictate terms for people whose circumstances and incentives they do not share, do not understand, and cannot possibly know individual motivations. The paternalistic presumptions of minimum wage should be an affront to a free people.
Williams made the moral point even more directly: if you do not own your labor — if you are not free to sell it on terms you choose — then someone else owns part of you. Minimum-wage laws obliterate a core principle of a free society: the right of peaceful individuals to make voluntary arrangements without political interference.
A policy that forcibly restricts human freedom has no claim to moral superiority.
The most basic lesson of economics — so often ignored in political rhetoric — is that price controls create surpluses or shortages. A minimum wage is a price floor. When imposed above the value a worker can produce, it does not raise that worker’s productivity; it simply makes it illegal to employ him.
Employers do not pay wages out of kindness. They pay wages out of revenue generated by the worker’s output. If a law requires an employer to pay $20 per hour for labor worth $12 per hour, the employer will not hire that worker. There is no mystery in this. There is only arithmetic.
When the government mandates wages that exceed a worker’s productivity, the worker is priced out of the job market entirely. In other words, the government mandates their unemployment.
The groups most harmed are those with limited skills: often teenagers, minorities, immigrants with limited English, individuals with poor schooling, and anyone needing a first step onto the employment ladder.
These workers do not need a law declaring their labor to be more valuable than it is. They need the opportunity to gain skills and experience so their productivity — and thus their wages — can rise naturally. Minimum-wage laws deny them that opportunity.
One of the great ironies of minimum-wage policy is that it kills precisely the jobs that build the foundations for success. First jobs are not primarily about income; they are about experience, habits, discipline, and the development of employability.
Minimum wage has led employers to eliminate entry-level positions, replace labor with automation, combine multiple low-skill roles into a single high-skill position, or simply ask existing workers to do more.
The gas station attendant, the grocery bagger, the usher, the dishwasher, and the clerk — positions once filled by teenagers and those entering the workforce for the first time — have quietly disappeared over the decades. Not because society no longer needs these services, but because it is no longer legal to hire inexperienced workers at wages that reflect their initial level of productivity.
Like many government interventions, the minimum wage creates a comforting illusion. Consumers and voters see the wage mandated by law; they do not see the jobs that never appear, the hours that are cut, the businesses that do not open, or the services that vanish.
The winners are the higher-productivity workers who keep their jobs. The losers are the lower-productivity workers who are pushed out of the labor market entirely.
Society pays in other ways as well. When labor becomes more expensive by law, prices rise, service options shrink, small businesses struggle or close, automation accelerates, and economic mobility slows.
Every additional restriction on voluntary exchange reduces the range of choices available to individuals. A society does not lose its freedom all at once; it loses it regulation by regulation, each wrapped in the language of noble intentions.
In time, citizens become less free not because freedom was taken from them violently, but because it was regulated away politely.
Minimum-wage laws allow politicians to appear compassionate while shifting the costs onto the invisible, the inexperienced, and the politically powerless. The policy was born in exclusion, survives through misunderstanding, and persists because its victims lack a voice.
Minimum-wage laws do not uplift the poor. They prohibit the poor from helping themselves. They do not expand opportunity; they ration it. They do not raise productivity; they merely outlaw employment for those whose productivity is too low.
Most of all, the minimum wage erodes one of the central pillars of a free society — the right of individuals to make voluntary arrangements that benefit both parties. When the state dictates the terms of peaceful exchange, liberty gives way to symbolism, and compassion becomes something performed rather than practiced.
A society serious about opportunity would not criminalize the first rung of the economic ladder. It would widen the path upward — not block it with good intentions and rigid mandates.
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Unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne
There are too many euphemisms in politics. And ‘euphemism’ can often be considered a euphemism for ‘lie.’
BY: Bob Weir, The American Thinker (May 9, 2026).
When I grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was an area, about half a mile downtown from me, known as “The Bowery.” One of the most elegant areas of the city during the 1800s, by 1900, the Bowery had devolved into low-rent concert halls, flop houses, beer gardens, brothels, and streets that became the living quarters for hundreds of people with no visible means of support.
These days, people in those circumstances are called “homeless” or “temporarily unsheltered.” In those days, they were known as Bowery Bums. The word, bum, simply refers to someone who refuses to work and tries to live off of others. Those who either chose or were thrust into such penury were also called loafers and tramps. Such references were made during a time in our history when euphemisms were rare.
Today, there are euphemisms for just about every activity that, if given the specific title, would be deemed offensive to civil discourse, also known as polite conversation. Hence, in a continuing effort to soften our language and distort reality, we find words that make us feel better about who we are and how un-judgmental we can be. Those who are extremely overweight are not referred to as obese or fat. Instead, a man would be called heavyset or husky, while a woman would be full-figured. People who used to be called handicapped or crippled are now labeled physically challenged. The famous comedian Henny Youngman told a joke about his brother-in-law who claimed to be a diamond-cutter. Later, it was learned that he was in charge of mowing the lawn at Yankee Stadium. Ed Norton, the famous sewer worker from the Honeymooners television show, introduced himself as “an engineer in subterranean sanitation.” Employees are never fired from their jobs; they are “let go.”
When I was a young lad, people who were physically attracted to the same sex were known as homosexuals. Now they are gays and lesbians. The late English author Quentin Crisp, who was openly gay, was also very open about the use of softened language. “Euphemisms are not, as many young people think, useless verbiage for that which can and should be said bluntly; they are like secret agents on a delicate mission; they must airily pass by a stinking mess with barely so much as a nod of the head.” Furthermore, “euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.”
In the days of yore, we never even heard of someone being able to change from one sex to another, but when surgeries came into being that pretended to do this, they became known as sex change operations. Soon, the term was considered objectionable, so it became “gender reassignment.” Once upon a time, if you supported taking the life of a child in the womb, you were pro-abortion; if you didn’t, you were anti-abortion. Now you’re classified pro-choice or pro-life.
Someone who has died is said to have passed away, bought the farm, given up the ghost, kicked the bucket, or, as the great Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “shuffled off this mortal coil.” When ending the life of a pet, it’s called “putting him to sleep.” When the mob wants to put someone to sleep, it puts a “contract” out on him. The mobsters don’t want to murder the guy; they want him “whacked,” “hit,” “taken for a ride,” or “fitted for a cement overcoat.” The bad guys don’t get sent to prison; they go to correctional institutions. In military terms, people and places bombed out of existence have been “marginalized.” When innocent civilians are killed during a war, it’s known as “collateral damage.” Slums and ghettoes have been euphemistically excised from the language and reborn as economically depressed or culturally deprived environments. People who violate our laws by sneaking across our borders are no longer “illegal aliens”; they are “undocumented immigrants.”
When taxpayers became aware of the term “earmarks,” which are pork-barrel projects intended to benefit constituents of a politician in return for their political support, it became an epithet for wasteful spending. Therefore, they needed a new name, so they were magically transformed into “legislatively directed spending.”
All of the foregoing is meant to be more than a linguistic exercise; it’s about questioning where we are as a society. It’s about our refusal to deal with reality, preferring instead to pretend what is happening before our eyes can be creatively denied by the use of more “tolerant” language. In other words, if we can find a comfortable substitute for the truth, we can avoid facing it. This doesn’t make me vomit; it makes me lose my lunch.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 