Watching the news this morning as I began my day, I saw an interesting little story about Barack Obama using his executive authority to issue a decree that he’ll not pay any person working under federal contract, any wage lower than $10.10 per hour. Immediately, the reporting news channel rushed a, “panel of experts,” onto camera. I can only believe of this group, after hearing their expert opinion, that they’d either slept through their economics courses taken while majoring in Sociology at college, or that they’d simply forgone that invaluable offering of higher learning entirely. There was one piece of helpful analysis however, offered up by an actual member of the Obama Administration. It was as refreshing in its honesty as it was subtle with its understatement.
Clearly, this order signed by the President was more of a symbolic gesture than a substantive one.
No kidding! This may be the understatement of the year so far.
It is simply stunning how dumb this President and his sycophants believe we the American People to be. I dare say that there hasn’t been a person working under federal contract for a wage lower than $25 to $30 per hour in well over two decades. That’s some sacrifice our Class Warrior in Chief has made on our behalf. Gather round my fellow gentle snow flakes, and hear the tale of something called the Davis Bacon Act. It was a piece of payback granted to the Unions for support of politicians many a year ago. For back in the ancient year of 1931, Organized Labor, after having bought enough of our political leaders at that time, received as payment for their support, one of the most destructive and evil pieces of legislation designed to destroy the economic prospects of ordinary people. The politically incorrect and more accurate description of the Davis Bacon act is as follows. During the initial government largess of the beginnings of the great depression, Black construction workers were coming north to perform labor at wages lower than the union contracted wages prevalent at the time. Davis Bacon was passed as a means to prevent those Black workers from being employed. This law requires that all people working for companies with whom the federal government contracts, be paid wages equal to the prevailing union wages for that region. Since there was no economic advantage to hiring the lower priced labor, they remained jobless, while the unions were able to keep their money flowing, thereby sweeping aside any of those nasty consequences of economic depression. In fact, this law was one of the reasons that our government was absolutely useless during the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010. Once the federal government got involved, and every salvage and engineering company in the entire nation capable of helping paid wages lower than the union wages deemed applicable by comparison according to the NLRB, the Davis Bacon Act meant that it was literally against the law to hire anyone who would have done anything to help. Thank God BP finally disobeyed the President’s Executive Orders of that time, and decided to plug the leak without permission. Of course if you remember, Barack Obama himself went on T.V. nightly to feign outrage and to promise that he was working tirelessly to solve, all by himself, the entire thing.
So, the President signed an order that basically accomplished nothing, except to solidify his bona fides as a populist. Which brings up an important point. If businesses can never be counted upon to voluntarily raise their wages paid in order to more reasonably reflect market conditions and the true value of labor, how is it possible the such an executive order would be so ridiculously meaningless as this one? The minimum wage has wreaked havoc on our economy during several periods of our nation’s history. The only times that this was not true were those periods during our history when the entry level wage for the vast majority of our nation’s employers were themselves far in advance of the minimum wage. This last condition itself points out the lie of everything the minimum wage proponents have ever said about their genius idea. For if entry level wages had risen above the minimum wage, that in itself shows that employers had responded to the market conditions as the free market advocates had predicted.
The fact is this, and it is unassailable. There is no law that government can pass which will increase your value to a third party, in most cases an employer. Your value to that employer will be based on what you in fact produce for them, and nothing more.
