Open Letter to Hillary Clinton

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Ms. Hillary Clinton

Ms. Clinton:

Have you no shame? Have you no decency? Surely you understand that ending disabled-workers’ exemption from the minimum-wage requirement will make almost all of them unemployable. Yet you nevertheless call for ending this exemption. Are you so greedy for votes that you’re willing to further worsen the lives of society’s most vulnerable and unfortunate people? Are you so intoxicated by the prospect of seizing presidential power that even disabled Americans must be crushed beneath your heels as you scramble for political support?

Obviously you are this greedy and you are that intoxicated – a reality that renders you especially unfit to exercise the power that you crave.

Please don’t insult my intelligence – or yours – by responding that you believe that making disabled workers subject to the minimum-wage requirement will merely mean that they all get paid more per hour. Such a belief implies that you imagine that disabled workers can miraculously overcome their disabilities and become more productive simply because such higher productivity is now necessary in order for them to keep their jobs at the higher, minimum wage. Do you also, then, believe that, say, imposing a literacy test as a requirement to vote will cause illiterate citizens miraculously to become literate simply because being literate is now required to vote and, therefore, that such a voting requirement will not diminish the number of learning-disabled people who vote? You cannot without great strain and twisting believe the former without also believing the latter.

Yet I’m confident that you believe neither. I’m confident that you understand that almost none of the workers who are today classified as disabled are capable of producing $7.25 per hour of value for employers (and much less of producing the $15 per hour that you and Mr. Sanders propose for a minimum wage). You just don’t care. Your ravenous appetite for political office makes you indifferent to the plight of these most unfortunate people who, victimized once by nature, will be victimized a second time by you.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

Professor of Economics

and

Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercator Center

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA 22030

…..

I thank my friend Reuvain Borchardt for alerting me to H. Clinton’s egregious proposal.

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