You always get less of what you tax more. Eternal Truth #461
George Rebane
For some years now RR has chronicled and mourned America’s decline in intellectual resources and critical thinking skills. This national dash to dumbth continues (nay, accelerates) as a purposeful process by progressives who have carefully husbanded public education at ALL levels for the last half century to achieve today’s new lows in pedagogy. Various writers and academics have observed this process for some decades now – Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996) are some earlier works that come to mind.
Most recently we have a comprehensive essay – ‘The Decline of Intelligence in the West’ – by educational theorist and literary critic David Solway that cites the work of many psychologists and cognitive scientists who have documented our “plummet in cognitive abilities” over the course of these years. These assessments come from a broad range of socio-political ideologues – e.g. Gruber’s on-target assertions on “the stupidity of the American voter” that would help pass Obamacare as his next step toward socialism.
Consideration of this descent is not an idle undertaking for those who want to sustain America’s achievements and support its continuing ascent in the 21st century as the world’s ‘shining city on a hill’. Denying the data, as Solway points out, hastens our decline, and serves the aims of globalists yearning for a post-national America. Science historian Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture (2000) observes that “a society cannot function if nearly everyone in it is stupid.” This truth is embraced by autocratic elites everywhere, and our cynical central planners daily devise and implement stratagems to keep America maximally dysfunctional, knowing how that concentrates power in government. Our Founders’ realization of this was summarized in Jefferson’s immortal ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’
Today we see an example of such a stratagem about to be run by the American voter one more time – the next rise in federally mandated wage controls in the imposition of the $15/hr minimum wage. Without going through the catalog of damages this will do to the poorest already in and those seeking to enter our workforce, I want to point out that almost no one in the country knows how and when America came to accept a minimum wage. That is one of the many parts of our history that has been wiped from our schools’ curricula in their dispensation of dumbth.
Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recounts (here) the “racially discriminatory roots” of America’s minimum wage laws born in the 1930s, and of today’s Pelosi-led progressive prevarications designed to bamboozle the ignorant and free into supporting the Dems’ $15 vote buying scheme. For openers, the minimum wage does NOT provide the breadth of economic benefit to the claimed target populations of women and the poor. But it will kill more jobs (1.4M according to the CBO) and remove another tranche of entry-level rungs of the economic ladder from those who need it the most.
But the most politically damaging part of the governments’ minimum wages is the history of their introduction and implementation. As Riley recounts, minimum wages were introduced to the country’s North in the attempt to stem the migration of blacks from the economically bleak agricultural South. The North’s black-excluding unions lobbied Congress where compliant “lawmakers complained openly about the ‘superabundance’ and ‘large aggregation of Negro labor’, and cited complaints by whites of black Southerners moving north to take jobs.” They knew that “low-income minorities stand to lose the most from lifting the wage floor because they are overrepresented among less-skilled and less-experienced workers.” And Team Pelosi, with Bumblebrain in the wheelhouse now, have not forgotten the benefits of that policy tool.
Perhaps most damning of today’s progressive narrative would be to recall JFK’s attempt in the Senate to protect New England industry by promoting minimum wages that would price blacks out of the low end of the labor markets. There in 1957 the young senator and soon our future president lectured a NAACP official, stating, “Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too—the wages of the white worker who has to compete, … and when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage—and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work—it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?”
We conclude with an apropos picture of America’s dumbth on the march. This is the Democrats’ siren song to their incomprehensively loyal African-American constituencies with carefully cultured deficits in history and economics.
rebanesruminations.com 
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