I remember a while back having a conversation with a Christian philosopher who assured me that raising the minimum wage would be a great policy, and put more money in the hands of the “working poor”. But when you study economics, one of the views that has the highest level of acceptance is that raising the minimum wage harms the poorest people, and especially young minorities.

Let’s take a look at what happened in one state that raised the minimum wage a lot.

This is from September 2023, from the far-left UK Guardian. You cannot go any farther left than the UK Guardian.

Excerpt:

In the face of recent intense pressures on fast-food workers, employees in the sector in California are about to get a boost with the creation of a body that will set wages and other standards for the industry.

The move is a hard-fought win for the labor movement in the state…

[…]Fast-food workers in California have held over 450 strikes since 2020, according to the labor group Fight for $15.

[…]The bill creating the body will also raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers in California to $20 an hour on 1 April 2024, with the council able to set annual wage increases beginning in 2025.

It’s a “win”! The fast-food workers are going to get a “boost”! Their wages are going to go up to $20 an hour! That’s what the secular left thinks will happen. And how could it NOT happen? After all, it makes the secular left feel so good. They feel so generous, handing out money that isn’t theirs. How could it not work, when it shows everyone how morally superior the secular leftists are? It HAS to work. It feels good, so it MUST produce good results.

So what happened next? The first thing that happened is that fast-food restaurants raised prices for consumers, because they had to pay for the generosity of the secular leftists or go out of business.

New York Post reports:

Menu prices at fast food chains across California have increased, as a new law went into effect requiring them to pay a $20-an-hour minimum wage to workers from Monday.

[…]The biggest leap was at a Burger King, where a Texas Double Whopper meal cost $15.09 on March 29 but surged to $16.89 on April 1, a whopping increase of $1.80 (nearly 12%) for the same meal.

The Big Fish meal also jumped from $7.49 on the menu before April 1 to $11.49 after — an increase of $4 (53%).

Most other items increased anywhere from 25 cents to a dollar.

Who buys fast food? Fast food is cheap food. The people who are hit with these higher prices are precisely the poor people that the secular left promised to “boost” with a big “win”.

What next? Well, these business owners are closing their restaurants because they cannot afford to pay their employees – even with higher prices. Why not? Because when you raise the prices of items without increasing the value, people find alternatives that are cheaper and better. And when sales go down, businesses close.

Here’s another article from New York Post:

Subway shrunk its sandwich chain in the US by 443 stores last year, a surprise downsizing that experts said could continue as the chain’s California shops face an increased minimum wage.

[…]The threat of further closures hangs over 2024, according to John Gordon, a restaurant analyst at Pacific Management Consultant Group — and a major reason is the increased labor costs in California, he said.

There were 2,719 Subways in California at the beginning of 2017. That number had plunged to 1,934 as of Dec. 31 — although Subway still operates the most locations in the state behind Starbucks. On April 1, the state’s minimum wage rose to $20 an hour from $16 an hour.

California has the highest unemployment rate in the continental United States. The minimum wage advocates don’t understand that mandating a $20 minimum wage doesn’t mean that workers will collect that wage. When they’re fired or laid off, they collect the REAL minimum wage – which is ZERO. The businesses just close, or they stay open and replace low-wage workers with machines.

The problem with California is that almost no one there understands basic economics. Nobody is reading economists like Thomas Sowell in California. Not the leaders of the state. Not the people who vote for those leaders.

Be careful what state you live in.

(Image credit: The Fraser Institute)

Which state is the best state in the union? For me, it comes down to Florida and Tennessee. Florida has a great legislature, and the best governor in the USA. Tennessee has a great legislature, and an above average governor. If you’re a taxpayer in one of these states, you’ve chosen wisely. You’re getting good value for your taxes. Let’s take a look at the latest win from the great state of Tennessee.

Life Site News reports: (H/T Sandra)

On Tuesday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the ‘Baby Olivia Act’ into law, requiring public schools to show school children a “high-quality, computer-generated animation or high-definition ultrasound” of unborn babies developing in the womb.

The law cites Live Action’s computer-animated “Baby Olivia” video depicting fertilization and fetal development from conception as an example of an animation that would meet the law’s requirements, which include the depiction of “the development of the brain, heart, and other vital organs in early fetal development.”

[…]Live Action has verified that the video accurately depicts fetal development, citing the review and certification of “leading OBGYNs and medical professionals” including Dr. David Bolender, who has a PhD in Cell Biology, Neurobiology & Anatomy, and Michelle Cretella, MD, Executive Director of the American College of Pediatricians. The information in the video was derived from the Endowment for Human Development, a bioethics nonprofit.

There are 1 million students in Tennessee public schools, and now, they’ll be making decisions about sex based on evidence.

The bill’s sponsor is Gino Bulso, a Republican who represents Brentwood, a wealthy and prestigious area of Tennessee.

He said:

“It is a scientific fact that human life begins at conception,” said Republican state Rep. Gino Bulso, the bill’s lead sponsor, in March. “At fertilization, you’ve got all 46 chromosomes, you have the entire genetic makeup of the child, and from that point on, it’s simply a matter of growth and development. So if you’ve got something that’s growing from the moment of conception on, I have no idea how anybody could say that you did not have life. You obviously, you’ve got life, because something is growing.”

Other states have passed or are considering similar legislation:

LifeSiteNews has previously reported that similar legislation is also being advanced in Iowa and West Virginia; Live Action notes it has also been introduced in Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia, and enacted in North Dakota.

Is the video accurate? Well, we have first class scientists who have collected the relevant information about this question for us, like Dr. Maureen Condic. Dr. Condic an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Adjunct Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, and recently served on the National Science Board. She earned her Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, and has published papers in peer-reviewed journals.

One of her publications (PDF) explains what science tells us about the unborn. The title is “When Does Human Life Begin? The Scientific Evidence and Terminology Revisited”. A good paper to have available, especially if your opponent has nothing but purple hair, tattoos and nose piercings. But if you want something easy, you can just use quotations from a variety of embryology textbooks (PDF).

Like this one:

“Human development begins at fertilization, when a sperm fuses with an oocyte to form a single cell, the zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell (capable of giving rise to any cell type) marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.”

Source: Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 10th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2016. p. 11

If you don’t live in a state where public schools teach these facts, then maybe it’s time to think about moving? Why pay taxes in a state that doesn’t take science seriously.

I’ve noticed that young women are quite frightened of men, because they are taught that men are dangerous. I’m concerned that these beliefs will deter women from choosing men wisely, and marrying them. One way to counter these fears about “domestic violence” is to take a look at the studies, and see who is really doing the violence. Is it always men, or is there a balance?

The study was published in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma.

Here’s the abstract:

Recent debates surrounding intimate partner violence (IPV) have focused on its gender symmetry and gender-oriented nature. These debates center on findings from various data sources, like victimization or self-reported surveys and police-based reports. Data by Statistics Canada, from 1999 to 2014, has shown that the prevalence of IPV is similar for male and female victims, except for sexual assaults. However, there has been a paucity of studies on the severity and risk factors of IPV against men by female partners. Thus, this paper examines the severity of and risk factors for physical IPV against heterosexual men in Canada using the General Social Survey (Victimization) data of 2014. This study revealed that there is a symmetry in the experiences of physical violence between male and female victims. This study also revealed that male victims experience more severe violence than female victims. Using binary logistic regression analysis, years of dwelling together, the victim’s age, childhood victimization, and marijuana use were found to predict physical IPV against heterosexual men. This paper concludes with suggestions about how these predicting factors can be used to identify male victims and the need for a more inclusive approach toward addressing IPV, which should include male victims.

The key points for us:

• scholars typically ignore violence against men committed by women: “However, there has been a paucity of studies on the severity and risk factors of IPV against men by female partners.”
• men and women commit domestic violence at roughly equal rates: “This study revealed that there is a symmetry in the experiences of physical violence between male and female victims.”
• Men are the victims of more severe violence than women: “This study also revealed that male victims experience more severe violence than female victims.”

This confirms data from a blog post I wrote a long time ago (2011) about this issue.

I found that:

Data from Home Office statistical bulletins and the British Crime Survey show that men made up about 40% of domestic violence victims each year between 2004-05 and 2008-09, the last year for which figures are available. In 2006-07 men made up 43.4% of all those who had suffered partner abuse in the previous year, which rose to 45.5% in 2007-08 but fell to 37.7% in 2008-09.

That’s the UK.

And:

An estimated 7% of women and 6% of men in a current or previous spousal relationship encountered spousal violence during the five years up to and including 2004, according to a comprehensive new report on family violence.

That’s Canada.

It’s interesting to note that the police and the courts do not acknowledge that women commit domestic violence. Whenever there is a report of domestic violence, the man is ALWAYS assumed to be the attacker, and ALWAYS arrested and removed from his home. That is the way that domestic violence works, according to the famous “Duluth model”. The Duluth model actually discourages men from getting into relationships that lead to marriage. Men don’t want to be attacked by women, and then treated as the aggressors by police.

Another factor also deters men from relationships and marriage: courts that are biased against men. When there is domestic violence, women are treated far more leniently than men. I blogged about a study about this recently, and found:

The estimated gender disparities are strikingly large, conditional on observables. Most notably, treatment as male is associated with a 63% average increase in sentence length, with substantial unexplained gaps throughout the sentence distribution.

I see stories all the time where women are violent, and get no jail time. Here is one story from January 2024 and here is another from March 2024.

Men do look at these studies, and they decide on their life goals accordingly. Don’t blame men for aligning their goals and decisions with the way that the world really is. If women want men to engage the way that men used to, they should stop being so defensive and fix the problems that are deterring men from relationships.