Ted Cruz's dad: “The Average Black Does Not” Understand The Minimum Wage Is Bad

[pbrower2a]

“And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”

So does he.  The KKK wasn't just in the South and when it did leave the confines of the solidly Democratic South in the 1920s, it was just as warmly welcomed by Republicans as Democrats.  Indeed, it in the North, it likely was more Republican than Democrats, especially amongst people whose grandparents had been nativist Know-Nothings.

Bigots rarely hate selectively. They usually attribute to those whom they despise what they dislike or fear about themselves. Lust. Greed. Violent impulses. Rebellion.  

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Also anti-Jewish and anti-union (Catholics largely associated with labor unions). And of course, all for keeping blacks 'in their place', to use the code-words of the time. The Klan in the North was basically people who wanted the preservation of WASP supremacy and did not care how brutally such would be done.

The 1915 Klan had most of the hallmarks of fascism before Mussolini used the word fascism.    

[pbrower2a]

African American voters have Stockholm Syndrome, and Democrats are incredibly proud for the psychological disease they have engendered in the minority community.

Middle-class, educated blacks reject the Republican Party in droves even if they would seem to have a shared interest of white people of similar education and income for lower personal taxes. Of course,  middle-class, educated blacks may be more likely to be government employees -- and even if professionals or business owners they may have clientele that use government aid. If your patients are Medicaid recipients or your grocery store relies heavily upon food aid, then you might have an interest in preserving a generous welfare state.

Lower taxes on much lowered income -- or having to get a new job that pays much less -- is a losing proposition for Republicans with blacks at any demographic level.

Stockholm syndrome? No. Rational self-interest. It need not be identical with your idea of rational self-interest to be personally valid.
   

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Maybe it is because the Republicans have little to offer but "Profits first, profits only, until we say otherwise".

[pbrower2a]

The average person does not understand that the minimum wage is not an optimally efficient or especially efficacious¹ policy option, but one that is generally, though not always, better than no policy to the extent that it has an impact. In fact, the positives and negatives of the minimum wage tend to be vastly overstated by both sides.

¹At combatting poverty or cost of living. There are better solutions to both than the minimum wage that also address efficiency.

It isn't perfect. So what? Neither are speed laws. Some people -- especially old people with slowed reflexes -- should be driving five miles or so below the speed limit just to adjust to personal reality.

[pbrower2a]

I don't know why he had to bring black people into this. (I mean I do, with context and all, but that's besides the point) Assuming the minimum wage was bad, you could say most people, not just blacks, don't understand that, or why. After all, large majorities support raising the minimum wage every time the matter is polled.

Low wages might promote the creation of capital, which may explain why the highest economic growth rates are in countries in the early stages of industrialization and tolerate the misery of early capitalism. Creation of capital may not be such a good idea in those countries in which multitudes have more stuff than they can handle. Creating more stuff to go to the landfill quickly is not my idea of economic wisdom.

Ultimately the success of capitalism beyond the early-industrial stage depends upon workers being a market. Severely-underpaid workers make an ineffective market even if they are highly productive. Employers might want to take advantage of the inability of workers to promote their own value as employees, let alone to imagine alternatives to being badly underpaid. Minimum wage laws deter employers from seeking to exploit the inability of workers to demand a fair wage.

Of course there are people so mentally or physically handicapped that they cannot be full participants in the economy and earn a fair wage. For such people, sheltered workshops are a solution because such people usually have vulnerabilities (like gullibility) that people can exploit for anti-social purposes from fleecing or sexually abusing them to tricking them into participation in criminal behavior.        

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I will say that 60+ plus years of blacks' support for the Democratic Party hasn't done terribly much to improve their wellbeing- it's not like the Civil Rights Movement was some DNC operation, and the Civil Rights Acts received more support from Congressional Republicans than it did from Congressional Democrats. I'm not sure what this "psychological disease" you refer to is, though. I would say that more was done for black people in the 20 years following the Civil War by Republicans than has been done by Democrats ever since.

However, I'm not Oldiesfreak, and I'm not suggesting black people should vote Republican because of thing people did 150 years ago... nor should they vote for Democrats based off of what happened half a century ago (that wasn't particularly the work of the Democratic Party, anyway).

But you'd also have to be rather unobservant to take notice of the fact that the modern Republican Party has been perceived as being less than entirely welcoming to, uh, people like myself, nor has it seemed particularly concerned with disabusing such notions. Now I manage because I'm quite decidedly not a liberal, and the Republicans in my neck of woods are less prone towards the sort of inclinations that makes the average black person come to the conclusion that the Republican Party is not at all aligned with their interests.[/quote]

The black middle class has expanded greatly over the last 60 years due to fuller integration of America in most aspects of life. The abolition of Jim Crow practice likely has some role. Blacks who have failed to keep pace with America as a whole are the ill-educated blacks who used to take industrial jobs that have since largely disappeared.  The trend hits and hurts ill-educated white people, too.

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This is a good post. I misread the second sentence as "Upper class blacks are generally Republican," which I was going to say I didn't think was true, but that's not what you said, so...
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Middle-class blacks still vote heavily D. Middle-class blacks are well-educated people on the whole,  and they associate education heavily with government aid or government jobs.  

[pbrower2a]

I don't know why he had to bring black people into this.

He didn't inject race into a conversation where it doesn't exist. Since the 1970s, data and economic research have indicated that the unintended consequences of minimum wage increases are shouldered by young inner-city minorities, particularly African American males.

The shift of employment from brute-force labor such as assembly-line work to more sophisticated service work that requires more behavioral refinement was inevitable. This was inevitable. The sorts of people who used to be hired as assembly-line workers are not the sorts that one wants doing even the lowest level of personal contact (as in fast food).

Jobs disappeared in factories as they appeared in fast food places and shopping malls. Assembly lines usually paid well; food service and merchandising have typically been low-paying activities. If anything, minimum wages would have slowed the growth of jobs in the job-growth areas such as fast food and retail sales of the 1980s. 

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Teenagers were not getting the assembly-line jobs that offered middle income. If teenagers were in the suburbs they could easily find the near-minimum-wage jobs that allowed them to buy clothes, electronic gadgets, and even cars because they were still living with supportive parents who recognized that the pay was too poor to live on. If teenagers were in the poor areas with few fast-food places or shopping malls, then they had to commute to those jobs or do without. In 1990 I could see a huge difference. It was hard to find restaurants in impoverished South Dallas, in contrast to North Dallas in which fast food places are everywhere.

[pbrower2a]

Jobs disappeared in factories as they appeared in fast food places and shopping malls. Assembly lines usually paid well; food service and merchandising have typically been low-paying activities. If anything, minimum wages would have slowed the growth of jobs in the job-growth areas such as fast food and retail sales of the 1980s.

Surely, you're joking. America's inability to prepare food at home, and their relatively recent love of retail goods is somehow related to the lack of US manufacturing?

No connection -- except that it took two clerical jobs to make the same income as one assembly-line job.