Lately, I have participated in a few discussions about the effects that the recently raised minimum wages are having on not only small businesses, but also on the people most in need of jobs that typically receive minimum wage payments. Those jobs are drying up, and quite predictably so I might add. In fact, what many of us said would happen is actually happening, yet it comes as a complete surprise to many, including the folks at BET. This is not the first time this has happened, but it seems to catch them off guard every time they do it, which has me wondering which of the two possible explanations is true:
1) The people pushing these artificially higher wages know what the outcome is going to be and that is what they want, more people reliant on big government OR
2) The people voting for this are too unintelligent, or emotionally controlled, to understand the inevitable, often repeated outcome of their well-intentioned but very detrimental actions.
While option 1 may in fact be the case for some folks (Democrat lawmakers), I think option 2 is likely the reason most of the voters went for it. They have no sense of history, they base their actions on their intent, not on the results. They are feel-good voters. They lack the ability to logically examine the cause and effect of their actions, or worse yet, they just ignore it. This got me to thinking about a piece I wrote back in 2013 for a now defunct blog. Below is the piece I wrote back then, and it is still just as true today as it was then.
A recent conversation with my mother got me to thinking and something that I’ve long realized; that liberals seem to live in their own sense of reality based on emotion, not logic. I have often wondered what the reason for that is. The conversation with my mother, a fiscal conservative, was actually about a conversation she had with one of her neighbors, a card carrying, Obama voting, big government loving California democrat.
They live in a nice small town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. A traditionally conservative area suffering from a recent influx of aging former hippies who are now retired. These former hippies are moving to this area from the democrat controlled larger cities in the valley below, the cities where they voted for the democrats in charge.
The conversation was started by my mother’s neighbor who mentioned that she was seriously considering moving out of California, to someplace like Idaho or possibly Texas. My mother was taken aback, and asked why she would consider to moving to such conservative places. The neighbor replied because the cost of living and the taxes are too high here in California. At hearing this, my mother, being much more reserved than I, was speechless.
That woman’s inability to link the cause (voting for more taxes, more government spending, bigger government) to the effect (higher cost of living, higher taxes) convinced me that in order to be a liberal, one must have some sort of “Cause & Effect Deficiency”. You (my mom’s neighbor) voted for tax increases, for bigger government, for everything that adds to a higher cost of living, and then wants to move because the cost of living is so high… What must go on in one’s brain to be unable to link those two so inextricably linked items?
The more I thought about that deficiency, the more I saw how it relates to so many other liberal themes. Rather than push for safer sex practices, let’s push for more abortions, later term abortions, abortions for teenagers without parental consent, abortion pills distributed in school. Rather than make policies (or call me crazy, reduce policies) that would allow businesses more room to grow thus driving up the need for employees, thus lowering the unemployment level, they vote for bigger government and more government control, which stifles private enterprise or just plain runs them out of business, increasing unemployment. What kind of logic process does it take to vote for a man who utters things like “Unemployment insurance is one of the most effective means to boost the economy. When people have more money to spend, it means more customers for their businesses, and ultimately more jobs.”??? (BTW, Barack Obama said that)
Let me say this, we ALL want lower unemployment. No one wants people to be homeless, hungry, sick without healthcare, etc. But wishing those things did not exist, and voting for expensive programs that do nothing but burn billions of tax dollars without any signs of positive results, is just ignorant.
To steal a line from Mike Rowe, the liberals are profoundly disconnected. There really is no other way to explain their ability to ignore the cause and effect relationships between their votes and what that vote results in. Perhaps I should try and get a government grant to study this phenomenon. Clearly, doing so would slow global warming (sorry, “climate change”), help the economy, stop the jobless growth, bring peace to the middle east and end world hunger.
And just as an update to this piece, my mother’s neighbor whom I discussed in this has since relocated to Idaho, where she is likely voting for the same crap that destroyed California. As a conservative seeking to relocate to a conservative state, I don’t blame residents of those states for not wanting refugees from this liberal cesspool.