The latest salvo in the never ending attack on common sense is this idea that McDonald’s employees can’t earn a living getting paid the minimum wage.  The sniveling Marxists are now demanding 15 dollars an hour for exploited fast food workers.  This comes on the heels of last week’s report that the City Council of Washington D.C. demanded that Walmart pay its workers a 12.50 minimum wage if they wanted to build stores in the nation’s capital.

The socialist mind, set afire over these last 5 years, literally has gone into full-blown mindless emotionalism.  These economic illiterates care so much more than normal people, that no matter how illogical and fundamentally wrong their arguments are ; they will not be dissuaded.

Here is the socialist argument in a nutshell:  People who work at McDonald’s don’t make a lot of money; they can’t afford a home and a car; they can barely pay the bills; so therefore, the government should FORCE McDonald’s to pay 15 dollars an hour to someone working a drive-through window.

In other words, in typical leftist fashion, people who know nothing about business, nothing about restaurant management, nothing about what is a fair wage for incredibly low-skilled employees, still want to dictate to the experts in the food industry what they should pay for that incredibly low-skilled employee.

Ugh.

1.  Forcing fast food establishments to pay artificially high and arbitrary wages of 15 dollars an hour will force the fast food industry to lay off workers or dramatically raise prices.  And who will that hurt?  The lower middle class folks who work and eat at these establishments!

I just watched a pasty-faced socialist on my television state she would be glad to pay double the price for a Wendy’s hamburger if it meant people working there got a living wage.

This is nonsense.  People will get laid off.  Also, no one in their right mind is going to pay big bucks for McDonald’s or Wendy’s.  It is not going to happen.  All this woman’s idea will do is bring more misery and more poverty.  (She’s probably a vegan)

2.  Socialists always like to wrap their wage arguments in emotional appeals.  They care so much they are willing to use government force to compel evil fast food restaurants to pay workers 15 dollars an hour.  If you are against that idea – you don’t care enough.  You are part of the problem.

But why stop at 15 dollars an hour?  Couldn’t we care enough to force fast food employers to pay 20 dollars an hour?  Why not 25?  Personally I think we can all find it in our hearts to demand they get paid 35 dollars an hour.  In fact – if the union bosses and left-wing economists really cared they’d support 35 dollars an hour for McDonald’s employees.

Newsflash:  There is a good reason why hourly workers at fast food establishments get paid 7.25 an hour (the current national minimum wage).  That is what they deserve to get paid based on their incredibly low skill levels.  These are not jobs that you are supposed to hold in order raise a family.  They are entry-level jobs for high school kids, people with low skill, etc.  If you are working at Wendy’s making fries or working the drive thru window – you should be working hard there while working hard at finding another job. I get it, you want to make a fortune building Egg McMuffins, but guess what?  No one will pay you a fortune to do that!

No, you cannot raise a family and own a home by cooking fries at Burger King.  I don’t care how good you are at making those fries, it isn’t worth more than 7.25 an hour (in fact it probably is worth less than that).

So yes, Karl Marx probably would support 15 dollars an hour for fast food workers.  Why?  Not because he cared, but because Marx wasn’t smart enough to run a fast food restaurant.  He was an exhausting boorish utopian nincompoop – which is why he became a leading leftwing economist instead.

It paid better.

-cj cheetham

Copyright © 2013 cjcheetham