The true road to serfdom

Bend over, here it comes again: Now they are going after the minimum wage. You damned swankpots don't deserve seven bucks an hour: Will you take five? Pretty soon, you'll have to.

Obviously, the thing that's killing this economy is slow demand -- and how can demand rise when fewer people have money to spend on movies, books, booze, cigarettes and other non-essential items?

Demand would rise if the minimum wage rose. If Wal-Mart paid its employees a living wage of $12 an hour, and if every cent of the increase were passed on to the consumer, the average shopping trip would cost a mere 46 cents more. Those decently-paid wage-earners would then have money to spend on consumer goods, which would increase employment.

Instead, libertarian ideology keeps us locked in a race to the bottom.

If Michele Bachmann -- who adheres to an even stricter form of libertarianism than that which we've already had to endure -- gets her way, jobs would go only to those desperate enough to work for subsistence wages. With fewer dollars in the pockets of the average workers, fewer goods and services would be sold. Even more enterprises would shutter for lack of customers, and those few which remain open would pay workers even less.

Libertarianism demands that we spiral to rock bottom. And you know what we call rock bottom? Slavery.

Bachmann believes in two Messiahs, Jesus and Ludwig von Mises. The Von Mises Institute produces incessant propaganda designed to convince the public that prosperity would increase if minimum wage laws were abolished: See, for example, here and here and here. Example:

The minimum wage removes the ability of some workers to compete by accepting lower wages and shuts them out of the labor force. As a result, it reduces job opportunities for these workers. A minimum wage breaks the hinges on the door of opportunity.

Ask the laborers who work under near-slavery conditions in unregulated Dubai whether they appreciate the "opportunity" they have received.

There are many more slaves in the world today than there were before the U.S. Civil War. A high (but reasonable) estimate puts the number of slaves at 27 million. All of them were created by unregulated capitalism. None of them were created by socialism or government regulation.

This interview with slavery expert Ben Skinner reveals what libertarians have in store for us here in America, if given the chance:

I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who'd been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo -- he asked me to protect his identity -- was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

Since he was a child, he and his family and his children, along with the rest of the enslaved villagers, took huge rocks out of the earth. They pummeled those rocks into gravel for the subgrade of India's infrastructure, which is the gleaming pride of the Indian elites.

They further pulverized that gravel into silica sand for glass. There's only one way that you turn a profit off handmade sand, and that's through slavery.

TM: Another method you describe: Someone shows up in a poverty-stricken village saying they need workers for the mines hundreds of miles away.

BS: It's a massive problem in the north of Brazil. What's tricky about this, in many cases these workers want to work. But they don't want to be forced to work under threat of violence, beaten regularly, having the women in their lives raped as a means of humiliating them, and then not being paid anything.

TM: They are transported to the mines, and when they arrive, they have a debt for that transportation, which is greater than anything they will ever be able to repay.

BS: And if they try to leave, there are men with guns. That's slavery.

The Dominionists want to bring slavery back to this country. (But it will be a nicer form of slavery, you see. So that makes everything all right.) Indeed, a strange black Dominionist named Wellington Boone has called slavery "redemptive."

Michele Bachmann has been linked to Dominionism.

Unregulated capitalism is the true road to serfdom. Without regulation, wages will continue to spiral downward until slavery becomes inevitable.

You think life under Stalin was bad? Indeed it was. But when the Randroids, the Dominionists and the Bachmannites are finished ruining this nation, you will envy the lowliest worker laboring in the most brutal year of the Soviet dictatorship. Hell, you'll envy even the slaves in the antebellum South. At least those slaves were considered valuable commodities.