He never did, unfortunately, but the laws of economics always do, eventually

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Seen on InstaPundit:

THE MINIMUM WAGE IS ALWAYS ZERO. How it started: Dodger Stadium workers ratify new labor contract. 

“This is a historic day for Dodger Stadium workers,” said Susan Minato, co-president of United Here Local 11. “As the team goes on to play for the top prize in baseball, the workers who serve the food and pour the drinks have also won.”

Wages for all workers will increase by at least $10 an hour, the union said, but a wide swath of employees — including stand workers, dishwashers and cooks — will see their hourly pay rise by $13.

A minimum guaranteed hourly tip of $8 will help boost employee wages, union members said. As an example, a concession worker who was was earning $18.14 an hour under the 2020 labor contract will now make $30.94 an hour.

—The L.A. Daily News, October 13th, 2022.

How it’s going:

The quantity of sewage is not strained, it floweth indivisible, like a torrent from their gaping mouths. No Kings Day vignettes from around the country

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“Indivisible Greenwich is comprised of hundreds of current and former law partners, doctors, business executives, government officials, authors and many others – responsible, intelligent and thoughtful men and women who have joined with 6,000+ branches of people from all parties and no party, to protect our democratic institutions and our most vulnerable populations from certain actions by the Trump administration.”

Joanna Swomley, founder of Indivisible Greenwich

Unfortunately, King Charles was unable to attend

UPDATE:

Is there anything in either of these that a proper Greenwich Invisible wouldn’t endorse?

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(It’s not mentioned in the clip, so I’ll point this out: this bill is being pushed by the “native” Ojibwa Indians, a band of savages that drifted west from Maine over the centuries and invaded Minnesota in the mid 1700s, driving the Sioux onto the Great Plains, where for 100 years, and thanks to the horses introduced into the New World by (white) Spaniards, the Sioux flourished, administered a sound drubbing to Custer June 25, 1876, and were then rounded up and made irrelevant. Reparations!)

And then there’s this:

Aww, the poor guy was just worried about getting to the Invisible Ladies of Greenwich's No Kings rally today

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 Deranged, as in “suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome: “wildly irrational or uncontrolled.”

Was he actually allowed to board a plane?

Flashback to 2012 — their agenda’s been progressing nicely

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While looking for something else, I ran across this old 2012 post on Instapundit by Elizabeth Price Foley - interesting reading; It’s remarkable, although sorrowing, to see how much of what Obama vowed to do has been accomplished, and how prescient Paul Gregory’s predictions in 2012 are proving true today.

CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES (CLS), WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION, AND HATRED OF THE CONSTITUTION: 

Here’s a great essay by Paul Roderick Gregory at Forbes.com about the wealth redistribution agenda of progressives–the legal iteration of which is embodied in Critical Legal Studies–and its worldview that the U.S. Constitution is inherently “flawed” because it doesn’t protect “positive” rights that redistribute wealth, such as health care, housing, education and economic security.  Oh, and BTW:  The old USSR constitution contained these juicy “positive rights.”  Yeah, er, um…. THAT worked!

Why the Fuss? Obama Has Long Been On Record In Favor Of Redistribution

Sep 23, 2012

In 2001, then state senator and University of Chicago law lecturer, Barack Obama, sat down for a public radio interview. At the time, he did not anticipate a near-term run for the presidency. He spoke candidly and deliberately about how to “break free” of Constitutional constraints against redistribution to provide “economic justice.” In the course of his interview, Obama laid out the electoral strategy of cobbling together the  “power coalitions” that have been the hallmark of his 2012 re-election campaign.

Politicians are said to speak the truth only by mistake. As his political career took off unexpectedly, Obama subsequently hid his views on redistribution, except in unguarded moments, such as “you didn’t build that” or “spreading the wealth around is good.” But on that day in 2001 in a Chicago public radio station, Obama candidly expounded his political and social philosophy as shaped by his critical-legal studies professors at Harvard and his experience as a community organizer in Chicago.

The 2001 “Obama Raw” interview remains the one definitive Obama soliloquy on the Constitution, redistribution, and economic justice. Strangely, it has not entered the discourse of the 2012 campaign, although a diluted version (“I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody’s got a shot,” Loyola University, October 1998) is currently making the rounds.  But it is Obama’s 2001 interview that represents, if ever there was one in politics, the smoking gun.

Obama’s radio interview offers four main take aways, which I summarize using his own words where possible:

First: “We still suffer from not having a Constitution that guarantees its citizens economic rights.” By positive economic rights, Obama means government protection against individual economic failures, such as low incomes, unemployment, poverty, lack of health care, and the like. Obama characterizes the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties,” which “says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.” (Ask not what you can do for your country but what your country can do for you, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy).

Second, Obama regrets that the Constitution places “essential constraints” on the government’s ability to provide positive economic rights and that “we have not broken free” of these Constitutional impediments.  Obama views the absence of positive economic liberties that the government must supply as a flaw in the Constitution that must be corrected as part of a liberal political agenda.

Third, Obama concludes that we cannot use the courts to break free of the limited-government constraints of the Founders. The courts are too tradition and precedent bound “to bring about significant redistributional change.” Even the liberal Warren Court “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.”  Obama opines that the civil-rights movement’s court successes cannot be duplicated with respect to income redistribution: The “mistake of the civil rights movement was (that it) became so court focused” and “lost track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground…In some ways we still suffer from that (mistake)."

Fourth, Obama argues that economic rights that the state must supply are ultimately to be established at the ballot box. Those who favor redistribution must gain legislative control through an “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.” The electoral task of a redistributive President is therefore to craft coalitions of those who stand to benefit from government largess. The legislature, not the courts, must do this “reparative economic work.”

In sum, Obama views the Constitution as a flawed document from which we must “break free.” We need, instead, a “living” Constitution that refocuses from “negative rights” to requiring income redistribution from the Haves to provide “positive economic rights” to the Have Nots.

Obama’s 2001 interview provides a clear statement of a judicial philosophy that displays little interest in the original intent of the Constitution. A second-term Obama would surely nominate judges who share his “living Constitution” principles.

The 2012 election is the first test of Obama’s “slice and dice” strategy of assembling power coalitions in favor of redistributive change. In 2008, extreme voter disaffection with George Bush and the alarming economic downturn allowed him to run as the “Hope and Change” candidate, reaching across party lines and racial divides.

Three and a half years later, “power-coalition” Obama has replaced “president-of-all-the-people” Obama.  His administration has granted government largess to organized labor (the GM bailout), green environmentalists (Solyndra), minorities of all stripes (racial quotas), and single women (free birth control). He counts on each to deliver their bloc votes. He is, apparently, prepared to write off major voting groups, such as white men and married women, but if he can patch together enough disaffected interest groups, he can win.

Obama must, however, attract enough voters who do not stand to gain materially from his electoral victory. He needs idealists, feel-gooders, and others so oriented who buy his argument that the government must take care of  his coalition members as a positive right.

The candid 2001 Obama openly conceded that positive economic rights and redistribution are part and parcel of the same package. The 2012 Obama argues for positive rights to income, jobs, health care, food, and other transfers without admitting they require massive redistribution. Instead, he intimates they can be covered by “those who do not pay their fair share.”

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An Obama electoral victory based on “power coalitions” unconstrained by “negative rights” would fulfill the Founders’ dread of  an “overbearing majority.” As James Madison warned in 1787:  “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.…. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

The Constitution’s framers used the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights (most importantly the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment) to render “the overbearing majority …unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression.” It is these “negative rights” that Obama proposes to eliminate. With them disappear restraints on limited government, and anything goes.

The Obama administration has given us a taste of an overbearing majority’s “schemes of oppression” (to use Madison’s words) not decided “according to rules of justice and the rights of the minor party:” the blackmailing of Chrysler bondholders, the transfer of property from creditors and shareholders to organized labor in the GM bailout, the attempted destruction of whole industries, such as coal,  through regulation rather than legislation, transfers of income from lenders to borrowers under forced loan renegotiations, and the use of unelected and unapproved economic czars to redistribute income and wealth by executive fiat.

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In a burst of what today might be regarded as political incorrectness, Madison wrote in 1787: “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties (by what Obama calls “negative rights”) is the first object of government.” In modern English: It is government’s job and duty to protect the rights of those who succeed, even if the majority wishes to take these rights away. That is the test of character of a democratic government.