Minimum Rage

Our Republican National Congress has done it again. In less time than it takes to say "morosely ironic" Congress has both voted to give themselves a raise (those are the only votes that always pass) and NOT to raise the minimum wage. I mean really, at $5.15 an hour, haven't those greedy working poor gotten enough out of our struggling corporate empires? They're lucky their jobs haven't gone to 5 year old Indonesian kids by now (for those of you who only recognize sarcasm in the tone of one's voice, I invite you to apply that tone to your inner narrator right about now).

Conservatives place too much faith in the capitalist system. The simple fact is that laissez faire capitalism proved itself a failure years ago. Need I remind us that the Great Depression really did earn the title, "great" for a reason. But laissez faire is no longer an issue. Congress has expanded its power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution by exponential proportions. Our conservative forbears have been forced to admit that there is no longer such a thing as intrastate commerce, at least for the most part. Now we must once again force reality down the throats of the conservatives.

The basic, driving principle of our economy boils down to greed, pure and simple. Proponents of the system will call it self-interest, but that's just a candy coating on the harsh reality of our economic existence. The story goes that capitalism works because each individual is motivated to accumulate as much wealth as possible, thereby encouraging both production and consumption, while the free, unimpeded market is guided by the "invisible hand" (I'm not making this stuff up, read "The Wealth of Nations") that works to fairly dispense commodities to those who work hard enough to deserve them. The problem is that with accumulated wealth comes great power and, when accompanied by a largely unregulated inheritance system, that wealth and power stays in the hands of a few individuals until we end up with the picture we all now see (or at least ought to see): the overwhelming majority of the world's resources concentrated under the control of the overwhelming minority of people. Karl Marx thought this phenomenon would lead to the inevitable uprising of the working class and subsequent mass redistribution of wealth. Marx, however, was wrong because he underestimated the stranglehold of power associated with great wealth and the phenomenon we Americans like to call our "dream," but what rightly ought to be called what it is- greed.

Now for those of you with just enough sense to know that Marx founded his own economic system, one that became a very dirty word in this country, let me clarify my own stance. I am not promoting a communist revolution. Communism has its own set of very dire problems that I will not address here, but suffice it to say that's not what I want. I simply have to add this caveat because the very mention of Marx's name tends to invalidate most arguments in this country, particularly those arguments with the ill informed.

My purpose here is to give a Stephen Colbert-esque "wag of the finger" to Congress for not increasing the minimum wage. $5.15 an hour is a joke, albeit a very unfunny joke to those who have to live with it. What I am saying to my conservative friends is this: don't whine about our welfare system, state-supported healthcare, or those dirty poor people who so inconvenience your lives and rob you of your hard-earned money through taxes when YOUR Congress, full of those people YOU keep voting for, won't even raise their wage to a paltry 7 bucks an hour. YOU asked for it, YOU got it, now deal with it.