I stumbled into a time warp this weekend over in the comments section at Calpundit.
In this post Kevin Drum merely echoed words spoken by every bar band and lounge act in America every night: "Hey folks, take care of your waitresses and bartenders."
He was responding to the effort by some chain McRestaurants to cut their costs by trimming the already-sub-minimum-wages they pay tipped employees.
Scrolling through the comments to Kevin's post, I felt like Marty McFly, stumbling out of the DeLorean and into some weird Cold War past of 1985 or 1955. For daring to defend the idea of a minimum wage, Kevin was accused of advocating "socialism."
No, really, they said "socialism." There are still people who talk like that. People with a binary, laissez-faire/Stalinism view of the world, still clinging to this view on the very weekend that Pope John Paul II was celebrating his 25th year of pointing out how foolish and inhuman this dubious dichotomy is.
Where do you even begin with such people? It's 2003. The Berlin Wall is a souvenir stand. The signature achievement of America's one, nominally "socialist" member of Congress is legislation requiring the disclosure of ATM fees. (Banks are still free to charge you $2 to access $20 of your own money, but thanks to Bernie Sanders, they have to tell you about it. Workers of the world unite!)
Can't we — like Marty McFly, finally leave the '50s behind? Haven't we already done so?
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