Minimum wage hike claims first casualty

By Adam Folsom

(Note: The following commentary first appeared as an Op-Ed in the August 31 issue of The Detroit News.)

I am one of the first casualties of Michigan's new minimum wage law.

I am a 21-year-old economics major at Hope College who last year worked part-time at the college's Office of Career Services for $6 an hour. On Oct. 1, however, it will be illegal for the school to pay me an hourly wage less than $6.95 an hour. So my boss called me last week and told me that her budget was tight and, because of the wage increase, my job would be cut.

I would have liked to continue working at $6 per hour, and Hope College was willing to pay me that. But the state of Michigan says I do not have the right to work for that amount of money. Hope College and I are not allowed to negotiate a contract that is satisfactory to both of us.

In my study of minimum wages, I have concluded that minimum wage laws always cause unemployment among the very groups they are supposedly trying to protect.

Our nation’s first federal minimum wage law was passed in 1918 and applied only to women. Employers had to pay women in Washington, D.C., at least $71.50 per month for their labor. What happened next is that many women found themselves out of jobs.

One of the casualties of that minimum wage law was Willie Lyons who, like me, was 21 years old. She worked happily as an elevator operator at the Congress Hall Hotel. She had been paid $35 a month plus two meals a day.

When the minimum wage law passed, however, the Congress Hotel could no longer afford to keep her. She wanted to work at the old wage, just as I do, but the new law made that illegal. Instead, the Congress Hotel hired a man at $35 a day plus meals. Like me, Willie Lyons became unemployed by a "compassionate bill" supposedly designed to protect her.

The good news is that Willie Lyons regained her liberty of contract. She testified before the U.S. Supreme Court in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923) and pointed out that she liked her job, her employers liked her, and she resented being ousted from her job by the new minimum wage law.

The Supreme Court agreed and struck down the federal minimum wage law (although a later court let such laws stand). In writing for the majority in the case, Justice George Sutherland wrote, "freedom of contract is the general rule and restraint the exception, and the exercise of legislative authority to abridge it can be justified only by the existence of exceptional circumstances."

Sutherland graduated from the University of Michigan Law School. I wish our Michigan legislators had studied Justice Sutherland before they passed a law that took my job.

Adam Folsom, a senior and a George F. Baker scholar at Hope College in Holland, Mich., is the son of former Mackinac Center Senior Fellow in Economic History Dr. Burton W. Folsom. The Mackinac Center is a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich.

Sixty percent of Americans, according to recent polls, consider Iraq a mistake. Given the unpopularity of the war, Democrats expect to capture one, if not both, chambers of Congress this fall. Assuming this happens -- and I still don't believe so -- will Americans be better off?

Sure, anti-war candidate Ned Lamont beat Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., in the Democratic primary. But look at Lamont's "strategy" for the war in Iraq. He calls for a "phased pullout" of troops. A "phased pullout"?

Sen. Lieberman, who disagrees with President Bush on virtually every domestic issue, understands the stakes in Iraq, even if his party members fail to. "I am convinced," wrote Lieberman, "almost all of the progress in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will be lost if [U.S.] forces are withdrawn faster than the Iraqi military is capable of securing the country."

During the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah (and Lebanon and Syria and Iran), we justly criticized the Lebanese government for the lack of will or ability to police its southern border. Yet many Democrats want us to leave Iraq and abandon the Iraqi military and police that show the will, if not the ability so far, to police and protect their own country.

Lamont's "phased pullout" would send yet another signal to the enemies to simply wait us out. Osama bin Laden considers America impatient, lacking resolve and unwilling to sacrifice. Recall that our hasty pullout from Vietnam, and subsequent failure to abide by promises made to the South Vietnamese, resulted in a bloodbath in Southeast Asia that left 3 million or more dead.

For insight into the Democrats' brand of appeasement foreign policy, look no farther than former President Jimmy Carter. Just a few months into his presidency, he urged Americans to reconsider our "inordinate fear of communism." Carter kissed then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev on the cheek. Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan.

Carter, a staunch Bush critic, helped to usher in the "Iranian Revolution" of 1979 by leaning on the Shah of Iran to "release political prisoners." To show their gratitude, Iranians seized 90 hostages at the U.S. embassy, holding 52 of them for 444 days, before releasing them minutes after Ronald Reagan took office. At the time of the hostage crisis, Carter sent what some called a believer-to-believer letter in longhand to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The letter praised the ayatollah as a "man of God."

The other major Democrat line of attack accuses the Republicans of fiscal irresponsibility. This is their strongest and most persuasive argument. For it is true that this president, with the approval of the Republican-run legislature, ran up bills at a rate faster than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson. Even if we exclude the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, homeland security and Katrina relief, the Republican Party turned its back on their alleged "limited government" philosophy.

But the Democrats' primary criticism is to call Republicans too stingy. About the monstrous expansion of Medicare with the prescription bill for seniors, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said, "Because the administration and the Republican leadership refused to provide the funds needed for an adequate drug benefit, more and more seniors are facing the ridiculous 'donut hole.' That's the huge gap which leaves enrollees with major out-of-pocket costs."

About No Child Left Behind, another unwarranted expansion of the federal government in education, Democrats, along with the National Education Association, call it insufficiently funded. "The law requires Washington to pay for it," said NEA President Reg Weaver, "and the fact is that Washington is not keeping that promise. As a result, our parents' tax dollars are getting steered away from the classroom and going towards boosting the profits of testing companies, instead of going towards their children's education."

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and other House Democrats recently released a six-pronged "New Direction for America" agenda for change: Real security and immediate phased pullout in Iraq; higher minimum wage; more affordable college; energy independence and lower gas prices; affordable health care; and something called "Retirement Security and Dignity," which calls for shoring up private pensions.

Notice anything missing? Not one word about North Korea. Not one word about Iran. And virtually every one of the six Democrat initiatives requires greater federal government intrusion, higher taxes and contempt for the private sector to compete and innovate. In short, "fiscal irresponsibility."

Americans, despite our uneasiness with the war in Iraq, nevertheless realize the consequences -- in the war against Islamofascism -- of an abrupt abandonment. And the next time you hear a Democrat attack Republicans for "reckless spending," ask the following question: "Aside from defense, where should government cut back?"

The silence will be deafening.

One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.

"Peace" movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called "peace" movements -- that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.

Take the Middle East. People are calling for a cease-fire in the interests of peace. But there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.

Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in the process. Indeed, American prisoners of war died when we bombed Germany.

There is a reason why General Sherman said "war is hell" more than a century ago. But he helped end the Civil War with his devastating march through Georgia -- not by cease fires or bowing to "world opinion" and there were no corrupt busybodies like the United Nations to demand replacing military force with diplomacy.

There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated.

"World opinion," the U.N. and "peace movements" have eliminated that deterrent. An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions.

That has been a formula for never-ending attacks on Israel in the Middle East. The disastrous track record of that approach extends to other times and places -- but who looks at track records?

Remember the Falkland Islands war, when Argentina sent troops into the Falklands to capture this little British colony in the South Atlantic?

Argentina had been claiming to be the rightful owner of those islands for more than a century. Why didn't it attack these little islands before? At no time did the British have enough troops there to defend them.

Before there were "peace" movements and the U.N., sending troops into those islands could easily have meant finding British troops or bombs in Buenos Aires. Now "world opinion" condemned the British just for sending armed forces into the South Atlantic to take back their islands.

Shamefully, our own government was one of those that opposed the British use of force. But fortunately British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ignored "world opinion" and took back the Falklands.

The most catastrophic result of "peace" movements was World War II. While Hitler was arming Germany to the teeth, "peace" movements in Britain were advocating that their own country disarm "as an example to others."

British Labor Party Members of Parliament voted consistently against military spending and British college students publicly pledged never to fight for their country. If "peace" movements brought peace, there would never have been World War II.

Not only did that war lead to tens of millions of deaths, it came dangerously close to a crushing victory for the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese empire in Asia. And we now know that the United States was on Hitler's timetable after that.

For the first two years of that war, the Western democracies lost virtually every battle, all over the world, because pre-war "peace" movements had left them with inadequate military equipment and much of it obsolete. The Nazis and the Japanese knew that. That is why they launched the war.

"Peace" movements don't bring peace but war.