William Patenaude published an excellent op-ed in the Providence Journal, recently, about his staunchly Democrat grandmother, a glass-ceiling-breaking Providence city council member:

I suspect that if my grandmother were alive today she would feel overwhelmingly betrayed by her beloved Democratic Party — the people she helped bring to power — especially those who have twisted the desire to embrace the outcast into support for harmful social norms, including not just abortion, but also partial birth abortion, which is even more hideous than it sounds.

From her days working in mills, my grandmother disdained the powerful who suppressed the weak — who defined life and death however it benefited them. How tragic that the party she hoped would change all that has instead endorsed the very worldviews that she and her generation emphatically rejected.

The specific subject of Bill’s intent is abortion, but the point applies more broadly.  The story line is that the Democrat Party is for the outsiders, the working class, the disaffected and disenfranchised.  How that narrative came to be cemented, given the actual history of the parties, is an interesting study (mainly involving the takeover of cultural institutions), but it’s beyond my scope, here.  What’s notable, right now, is the degree to which the narrative just isn’t true.

I thought that when I read this PolitiFactRI gift to Congressman David Cicilline on minimum wages across the globe.  The general point that should be made about the minimum wage is that it costs people jobs, just as the importation of low-skilled immigrants costs low-skilled Americans jobs.

The specific argument of the article makes things all the more egregious, because it compares international minimum wages.  Instead of adjusting wages for cost of living, or some similar factor, PolitiFact adjusts them for the median wage of the workforce.  That is, the exact middle income of everybody working in a particular country.

It may be a little bit of a digression, but the economic illiteracy (or even the lunacy) of this view merits comment.  A particular job has a particular price of labor.  To some degree, that price (i.e., income) should go up if the society’s ability to pay for the service increases, but to say that it should adjust in parallel is to insist on universal inflation.

The gains of hard work and innovation in the economy become completely wiped out, because the price for every job for which people were already paying goes up to absorb them.  On the large scale, innovation would cease because there’d be no incentive for it and there would be no surplus profits to reinvest.

Income disparities would actually increase, as well, because people down the ladder wouldn’t be able to ride their own hard work and innovation upward.

Something similar came up in the comments to a recent post by Monique.  Commenter Russ put forward donations from corporations toward the URI College of Engineering project as evidence that a huge infusing of government debt will be good for workers.

It ultimately isn’t surprising, though, that companies with a large percentage of engineers would want the local public university to produce more of them, despite the fact that 57% of employed engineers from the program found their jobs out of state.  After all, more engineers in the state means the companies can pay less, because their price goes down.  (If you’ve now got four engineers who want to stay in the state for whatever reasons, rather than two, the odds increase that one of them will accept the job at lower pay.)

This may increase the number of engineering jobs in the state, because being able to hire people more cheaply will help to compensate for all of the other things that drive up the cost of doing business in Rhode Island.  However, it will do so on the backs of working men and women.

This is the direction in which progressives want to move things — with government cooperating with private interests to shape the population in a top-down way.  Not surprisingly, the people at the top shape things to their benefit.

Another approach would be to lower all of those other factors that increase the cost of doing business… like burdensome regulations and high taxes caused, in part, by a love of funding projects with debt.  Companies will then need engineers and other employees in order to capture the savings of simply being here.  Increasing the number of jobs first will allow the employees to demand higher pay.

Then, with greater availability of jobs as well as the increase in pay, more people will find ways to invest in the degrees (like engineering) that qualify them for the jobs.  With more students, URI could expand with increased revenue, or perhaps with private investors who want to profit from the upswing.

As with so much in modern politics, the policy whose supporters proclaim their intention as helping working people actually harms working people.  It’s the policy that allows all people to innovate and build their own careers and businesses that ultimately helps everybody down the ladder.