On a side note: On his birth certificate, Martin Luther King Jr.’s first name as listed as ‘Michael’. Clearly a typo, because then he wouldn’t have been a ‘Jr’, would he?

Trent and Smally conducted studies of why some families are close and some not. Their conclusion was that families that work together against a common outside negative influence were closer. Through most of humanity’s existence fathers and sons, mothers and daughters have worked side-by-side againt the common evils of starvation and deprivation. Now we’re too sophisticated to allow that, and have minimum wage laws that prevent young men from working beside their fathers in the workplace. This is part of why the family structure has weakened in America. Thus I claim that eliminating the mimimum wage could be pro-family.

The two camps in the abortion debate are the pro-life group that says that life begins at the moment of conception and the pro-choice people that say that a person’s rights begin at the moment of birth. I’m neither. I say that whatever yardstick we use to measure the end of life should be the same as what we use to measure it’s beginning. Medical science would tell us that when a certain type of brainwave stops, a person is clinically dead.  Apparently neither side of the abortion debate has any issue with that. I say that it’s only common sense to say that, therefore, when those same types of brain waves begin, the fetus is then a person and has rights.

Now I’m in trouble with everyone, because I’m not saying that live begins either at the moment of conception or personhood at the moment of birth, but somewhere in between. Right. But as far as I can see, my argument makes sense in the “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” way. We need to use the same measure for the start of life as we do for the end.

Not only did this under-the-table arrangement help the struggling family, but it was an early form of recycling (before it was cool). Eliminating the minimum wage would enable many more materials to be cost-effectively recycled as illustrated in this story. So eliminating the minimum wage is actually Green.

Is this what would really happen? Yes. Before President Johnson’s “Great Society” experiment where he raised the minimum wage, the unemployment rate among black male teenagers was actually lower than white male teenagers. Why? Because black male teenagers would generally work for lower wages. Raising the minimum wage threw tens of thousands of black male teenagers out of work. Minimum wage legislation is generally sponsored by trade unions trying to protect their jobs agains lower-wage competition. I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not, but the minimum-wage legislation of the 1960s and 70s had a pronounced racial bias, destroying the jobs of disproportionately more blacks than whites. Again, I don’t know if that was the intent, but the result was definitely racist.