Capitalism is mean. Turning a profit is bad. If you give people more money, they’ll have more money. More money is good.

And if you tell your customers that you have to raise prices because of the preceding dimwittery, that’s bad.

Kelly Smith, Minneapolis Star Tribune:

A small cafe in Stillwater has thrown itself into the big battle over Minnesota’s minimum wage increases, inundating the cafe with dozens of phone calls and online comments this week after it tacked on a 35-cent fee to meal tabs.

Oasis Cafe owner Craig Beemer said the fee is needed to offset the 75-cent wage hike that took effect Aug. 1, the first time Minnesota’s minimum wage has increased in a decade. Even with only half a dozen servers, Beemer says it will cost him $10,000 more a year to pay servers $8 an hour instead of the federal rate of $7.25 an hour. Instead of adding it on to food prices, he added the “minimum wage fee…”

“We believe that the industry is overreacting,” Wade Luneburg of the MN State Council of UNITE HERE Unions told the Star Tribune this week. “Putting [minimum wage] fees on tickets and passing the cost on to consumers directly is strange at best, and creates an ‘us against them’ mentality while ordering dinner.”

When you make running a business more expensive, the business passes that expense on to the customer.

It’s not Beemer’s fault that he has to charge more. He just wants to make sure that you, the customer, know that. His critics would rather you remained ignorant of the consequences of voting Democrat.

If you don’t want to cultivate an “us against them” mentality, geniuses, stop being them. Leave us the hell alone.

(Hat tip: John Hinderaker)