Let me open with the sentence that is going to make several people very uncomfortable before I have even finished my coffee.
The minimum wage is a Jim Crow law. Not “Jim Crow adjacent.” Not “has some racist history if you squint.” An actual, documented, still-functioning mechanism for locking people out of the labor market and into government dependency — built by the same coalition, defended by the same party, and producing the same outcome it was engineered to produce a century ago.
And it does not work alone. That is the part I really need you to sit with today, because I am not writing a tweet-length gripe about one bad law. I am walking you through an entire ARCHITECTURE — wages, housing, welfare, and healthcare, four separate policy levers, all pulled by the same party, all producing the same result on the same population, decade after decade. When four different locks on the same cage were all installed by the same locksmith, you stop calling it coincidence.
I am a science teacher. I deal in data, not vibes. So buckle up, because I am about to walk you through the receipts, and then I am going to show you the part nobody puts on the evening news — the part where the wage floor, the zoning code, the welfare check, and the insurance mandate work together as a matched set to keep an entire community voting for the party that built the trap.
I watched a local news segment out of San Antonio this week. KSAT. A new bill in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour — large companies would have until 2032 to comply, smaller ones until 2039. An economics professor on camera said a jump that size would “never fly,” but a smaller increase “makes more sense.” The station polled viewers. Sixty-two percent said yes, raise it to $25.
Sixty-two percent of people, asked a question with no follow-up questions allowed, said yes to free money. I could poll my sixth period about whether Fridays should be optional and get the same number. That is not policy analysis. That is a sugar craving with a microphone stuck in front of it.
So let us do the follow-up questions the poll did not ask. All of them.
Here is what does not make it into the civics textbook, including — I will admit this uncomfortably — the one that sat on shelves before I wrote my own.
The minimum wage was not invented by union heroes fighting for the little guy. It was invented by progressive eugenicists who said, in print, under their own names, that they wanted it to price certain people out of the labor market entirely. Princeton economist Thomas Leonard spent a career documenting this so thoroughly that the modern left has simply chosen not to read him. The word these progressive economists used for the people they wanted priced out was “unemployables.” When they wrote “unemployables” in 1913, they meant Black Americans, recent immigrants, and the disabled. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, intellectual royalty of the progressive movement, called it “social cleansing” in their own writing. Not my word. Theirs.
Union leadership of that era did not even bother with euphemism. Minimum wage rules, they said, removed “the incentive for employing the Negro.” That is a direct quote from a primary source, not my paraphrase, not a hostile interpretation. It is sitting in the historical record for anyone who wants to check my work.
Then came the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — a federal wage floor on government construction jobs, pushed through by Southern Democrats and Northern union bosses who were furious that Black construction workers kept winning federal contracts by working for market wages. Texas Congressman Martin Dies said it on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, not in a diary, not in a private letter — on the floor, in the Congressional Record: “you cannot prescribe the same wages for the Black man as the White man.” The bill passed.
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — the law that actually created the federal minimum wage — excluded agricultural workers and domestic servants. Historian Ira Katznelson documented, at exhausting length, that this was the specific price Southern Democrats demanded for their votes, because agricultural and domestic work is where Black labor was concentrated in the Jim Crow South. A wage floor that carves a hole exactly the shape of the population you want to keep controllable is not an accident of drafting. It is the whole point of the drafting.
Milton Friedman — Nobel Prize, 1976 — called the minimum wage “the most anti-Negro law on our statute books.” 1966. In print. And today the party that built that law stands at a podium and calls raising it “racial justice.”
Say that combination out loud a few times. A law engineered by eugenicists to exclude Black workers, defended for ninety-plus years by the Democratic Party, and rebranded — with a completely straight face — as the moral high ground. If a Republican had designed a policy this way, it would be a chapter in every AP U.S. History textbook printed since 1975. Because Democrats designed it, it is a “living wage” bumper sticker.
That is racist. Not “has racist optics.” Racist in its founding text, by its own founders’ own words.
— THE MATH THEY DID NOT PUT ON THE KSAT CHYRON —
Back to that $25 bill. Let us run the actual arithmetic, because arithmetic does not care which party is holding the microphone.
The average McDonald’s wage right now sits somewhere around $12.20 an hour once you blend smaller and larger markets. A Big Mac averages around $6.12. Double the wage to $25 and, on labor cost alone, that Big Mac is pushing past $12. That is not a “cost of living adjustment.” That is a wage mandate manufacturing the exact inflation it claims to be fighting, and then handing you the bill disguised as a burger.
Here is the part the professor on your local news gently tiptoed around: a $25 federal floor does not hit every business the same way. A company in Manhattan or downtown Chicago barely notices it. A company in Toledo, or Hope, Arkansas, where the cost of living and the going wage are both a fraction of New York’s, gets steamrolled. Big-box retailers with economies of scale, automated kiosks, and enough volume to renegotiate supplier pricing survive a $25 floor just fine — some of them lobby FOR it, because it is the cheapest way imaginable to bankrupt the small competitor down the street who cannot absorb the hit. The mom-and-pop shop closes. The Walmart two blocks away, which can spread the cost across a thousand more registers, picks up the customers. The party that claims to hate big corporations just handed them their next monopoly, gift-wrapped, and called it compassion.
Quinn’s First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. Every single time. Set your watch by it.
— EXHIBIT TWO: MAKING AFFORDABLE HOUSING ILLEGAL, ONE ZONING CODE AT A TIME —
Here is the one nobody wants to talk about because it does not sound racist. It sounds BORING. Minimum lot sizes. Single-family-only zoning. Setback requirements. Parking minimums. Density caps. Environmental review processes that let existing residents delay a housing project for years with a single lawyer and a filing fee. The vocabulary of American zoning is engineered to put you to sleep before you notice what it actually does.
Here is what it actually does. Researcher Tianfang Cui documented, in a 2023 empirical study, that the explosion of exclusionary zoning in American suburbs tracked — not loosely, PRECISELY — with the Great Migration, as Black Americans moved out of the Jim Crow South into Northern and Western cities in the middle of the twentieth century. In the exact areas where the data predicted the highest Black in-migration, minimum lot sizes shot up and got dramatically more restrictive. That is not an accident of city planning. That is a wall, built out of paperwork instead of brick, and it went up right when the people it was designed to keep out started arriving.
Here is the mechanism, and it requires nobody to write a single racist word in the actual code. Mandate that every home sit on a lot of five thousand square feet minimum, and you have set a PRICE FLOOR on land regardless of how modest anyone’s construction plans are. Developers then build the most expensive home the lot can support, because that maximizes their return. Entry-level homeownership becomes structurally impossible in that town. The people who cannot afford the result are excluded without a single explicitly racial line in the statute. Same trick as the minimum wage. Write something that sounds neutral. Engineer it to land on one population. Act shocked when someone traces the math.
The Lakewood Plan of 1954 — a California suburb that incorporated specifically to seize local zoning control while contracting police and fire from Los Angeles County — was 99 percent white by 1960. The model spread across California and then across the country, and it did not need a single “Whites Only” sign to accomplish exactly what one would have accomplished.
And here is the detail that should make every progressive lawn sign spontaneously combust. The wealthiest, most self-described “progressive” suburbs in this country — the ones plastered with equity yard signs and inclusion bumper stickers — also happen to run the most aggressive exclusionary zoning in the nation. San Francisco. The Westside of Los Angeles. The wealthy Westchester suburbs outside New York City. They campaign on compassion and legislate on exclusion, and homeownership — the single largest driver of intergenerational wealth in American life — gets walled off from the families the zoning code was engineered to keep on the other side of the town line.
That is racist. Structurally, measurably, by design, and defended today by the exact politicians putting equity signs in the yards their zoning code protects.
— EXHIBIT THREE: THE GREAT SOCIETY — A WAR ON POVERTY THAT WON THE WAR FOR POVERTY —
I want a number to sit with you before I say another word. Black poverty in America fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960. Forty points. In twenty years. Before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Before the War on Poverty. Before a single dollar of the roughly $22 trillion the federal government has spent on poverty programs since 1965. The free market, economic growth, and an intact family structure did that. Forty points, on their own, no federal welfare architecture required.
Now watch what the Great Society did with that momentum. In the twenty years AFTER 1960 — the actual years of Great Society programs, housing projects, and the War on Poverty — Black poverty fell eighteen points. Not forty. Eighteen. Thomas Sowell, the Black economist most establishment academics will not debate on camera, put it plainly: the downward trend was already there before Johnson, and it did not even accelerate after 1960. The government declared war on poverty, spent $22 trillion, and delivered WORSE results than simply doing nothing had already been producing.
Shelby Steele, also Black, also inconvenient to the narrative, described what actually happened to agency in the Black community once the Great Society arrived: government told people put your life in my hands, I am the agent of your uplift, not you — and, in his words, “we sold our soul away.” That is not a white conservative saying that. That is a Black man who lived through the transition, watching what was taken in exchange for the check.
Here is the number that should end the conversation permanently. In 1960, roughly 80 to 85 percent of Black children were raised in two-parent households — a figure that had survived slavery, the Black Codes, and Jim Crow terrorism intact. Within ONE generation of Great Society welfare rules — benefits that vanished the instant a mother married — that number collapsed below 30 percent. Out-of-wedlock births went from 21 percent in 1965 to over 77 percent today. Two hundred years of slavery could not break the Black family. Jim Crow could not break it. Sixty years of Democratic welfare architecture did it in thirty.
Detroit: richest city in America per capita in 1950. Largest municipal bankruptcy in American history in 2013. Democratic mayors, exclusively, since 1962. Not one Republican. Sixty-three straight years, one party, one outcome.
The antebellum South needed a captive population to sustain its economic order. The Great Society built a new captive population, needing the same thing, for the same reason, sixty years later. Chains became benefit cards. Overseers became caseworkers. The plantation simply updated its management software and kept the same org chart.
That is racist. Not in intent, necessarily — I will leave malice versus staggering negligence as an open question — but racist in outcome, sustained for sixty years by a party that refuses to change course because the outcome serves its coalition.
— EXHIBIT FOUR: THE ACA — MANDATED LOYALTY TO AN INDUSTRY THEY CLAIM TO HATE —
Let me ask a question that should be simple and somehow never gets a straight answer. If the party that passed the Affordable Care Act genuinely believes insurance companies are the villain — remember, part of the online left turned a man who murdered a health insurance CEO into a folk hero and a symbol of justified rage against the industry — why did their signature healthcare law make it a LEGAL REQUIREMENT for every American to purchase a product from that exact industry?
Pick a lane. Either the insurance companies are the enemy, in which case why did you write them a captive customer base by federal statute, or they are a legitimate business partner, in which case retire the folk-hero routine immediately.
Here is where it gets specific, and where it gets racially disparate in exactly the way this whole article has been tracking. Working-class and lower-income Americans — disproportionately Black and Hispanic households — are the ones who actually feel an individual mandate and a premium spike. The COVID-era ACA subsidies inflated the appearance of affordability for years. Then Democrats — not Republicans, not one single Republican vote — chose to let those enhanced subsidies expire, and premiums for exactly this population jumped. If you voted for the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 or the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and are now wringing your hands about premium increases, you built the cliff you are currently standing at the bottom of, pointing up at someone else.
And here is the alternative nobody in that caucus wants to discuss: Health Savings Accounts. An HSA puts the actual dollars, and the actual decision-making, directly in the hands of the person receiving care — no middleman, no mandate, no captive relationship with an insurer whose leadership got cheered for being murdered by a corner of the internet. Why is the party of “healthcare is a human right” so allergic to the one mechanism that hands the poor and working-class actual control over their own healthcare dollars instead of a mandated subscription to a private insurance company? I will let you sit with that question, because I already know why, and so do you.
That is racist in impact — a mandated financial obligation, defended by the party claiming to fight for the poor, landing hardest on exactly the households this article has been tracking through zoning, wages, and welfare all along.
— THE NEW OVERSEER: HOW A DEAD-END WAGE FLOOR BUILDS A WELFARE PLANTATION —
Now here is the section that ties all four exhibits into a single machine, because this is the part that never gets said out loud in polite company, and I am done being polite about it.
Raising the minimum wage does not just fail the people it claims to help. It manufactures the exact dependency the Democratic Party needs to stay in power, and it does it in partnership with the zoning code that keeps that population renting instead of owning, and the welfare cliff that keeps working unprofitable, and the healthcare mandate that keeps a paycheck spoken for before it even arrives.
Four locks. One cage.
Walk through the wage-and-welfare piece with me slowly, the way I would with a sophomore encountering a concept for the first time.
An entry-level job is not supposed to be a career. It is supposed to be a RECORD. A resume line. Proof to the next employer that you show up, that you take direction, that you can be trusted with a register or a stockroom or a set of car keys. The sixteen-year-old flipping burgers is not being exploited. He is being ONBOARDED into the economy for the first time in his life, at a price an employer is willing to risk on someone with zero track record.
Now mandate that same employer pay a fully trained, full-time adult’s wage for a kid who has never held a job. The employer does the math the same way I do when I am grading — value in, cost out — and the math no longer works. So the job does not get created. Not “gets paid less.” Does not exist. The teenager, the ex-offender trying to get back on his feet, the single mother re-entering the workforce after a gap — all of them lose the one thing that would have gotten them a foothold: a first entry on a resume that says this person can be relied upon.
No entry-level job means no work history. No work history means the next employer will not take the risk either. And a person with no way to earn income and build a resume becomes, by pure mathematical necessity, a person who applies for SNAP, for housing assistance, for whatever the safety net offers — not because they are lazy, but because the ladder’s bottom rung was sawed off by statute before they ever got a hand on it. Meanwhile the zoning code has already made sure that even if they did earn enough, there is nowhere affordable to buy in.
Now here is the mechanism that keeps them there. Welfare benefits in this country are structured so that earned income phases them OUT. Take a part-time job, even at a decent wage, and you can lose more in benefits than the job pays you. Congratulations — the system has just made working a financial LOSS. A rational person, faced with that math, stays on the program. Not because they want to. Because the incentive structure was built, brick by brick, to make dependency the smarter choice.
I want you to notice what that structure actually IS. A population locked out of entry-level work by statute. Locked out of the wealth-building on-ramp of homeownership by zoning. Kept financially dependent on a government check by a third statute. Locked into a mandated insurance relationship by a fourth. Required to keep voting for the party administering all of it, because the moment that party loses power, any piece of it might stop. That is not a safety net. A net catches you so you can climb back up. This is a leash. And a leash held generation after generation, by one political party, over one population that cannot legally build its way out from under it, has a name in American history. We usually call it enslavement. I do not use that word carelessly, and I am not using it carelessly now.
The antebellum South needed a captive underclass with no legal path to economic independence, in order to sustain its political and economic order. The modern wage-zoning-welfare-healthcare combine needs the exact same thing, for the exact same reason. Chains became benefit cards. Overseers became caseworkers. The plantation got rezoned into a housing project — one the zoning board down the road made sure could never expand into anywhere nicer. The mechanism of control — you cannot leave, because we made sure you cannot build the income, the equity, or the record to leave — did not change one degree in two hundred years. It just changed its letterhead four separate times.
That is not a metaphor I am reaching for because it sounds dramatic on X. That is the literal structural description of what a wage floor, an exclusionary zoning map, a benefits cliff, and an insurance mandate produce when you run them together for sixty years. It is Jim Crow with four different signatures on four different bills instead of one sign on one door — same goal, keep the underclass captive and controllable, just spread across four agencies so no single one of them looks like the whole picture.
— QUINN’S LAWS, RIGHT ON SCHEDULE —
Quinn’s Second Law tells you exactly where to look when you want to know what liberals are actually doing: watch what they accuse conservatives of. Democrats spend every February reminding you that Republicans are the party of Jim Crow’s legacy. Meanwhile their own signature economic policy was engineered by their own ideological ancestors to price Black Americans out of work, their own zoning maps in their own bluest cities wall off Black families from homeownership, their own welfare architecture keeps that same population one paycheck-that-never-comes away from needing the very party that built the trap, and their own healthcare law mandates loyalty to an industry they publicly pretend to despise. The accusation is the confession. It always is.
Quinn’s Sixth Law: facts are the enemy of liberalism. Every fact in this article is checkable. That is exactly why you will not see it debated point by point. You will see it called something else instead.
— THE LADDER THEY KEEP SAWING OFF —
Here is a revolutionary concept nobody in Congress seems to have encountered: wages are set through voluntary agreement between an employer and an employee. A person agrees to accept the wage a business is willing to pay. If nobody accepts it, the business raises the offer to attract someone. That is not exploitation. That is arithmetic with a pulse.
McDonald’s — which already pays well above minimum wage in most markets — knows the crew position is a stepping stone, not a destination, and the shift-manager and store-manager jobs are the actual career ladder. Walmart, also paying above minimum wage, will let a hard worker climb to store manager pulling six figures with zero college debt — out-earning plenty of people holding a master’s degree they are still paying off. That is the ladder working exactly as designed. Mandate a $25 floor on the bottom rung, wall off the housing market with zoning, keep the safety net structured to punish earning more, and mandate an insurance bill on top of it — and you do not raise anybody up. You saw the rung off, brick the exits, and stand there astonished when nobody can climb.
— EXHIBIT FIVE: 1963 CALLED. IT IS STILL WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO PICK UP —
On January 10, 1963, Congressman Albert S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read forty-five Communist Goals for America into the Congressional Record, drawn from Cleon Skousen’s “The Naked Communist.” Goal 40: discredit the family as an institution. The welfare architecture we just walked through — benefits that vanish the moment a household forms two working parents, income cliffs that punish marriage and reward staying single and dependent — hit that goal with a precision no coordinated conspiracy could have improved on.
Goal 32: support any socialist movement to give centralized control over welfare programs, education, and culture. A federal wage floor, a federally entangled housing market, a federally administered dependency net, and a federally mandated insurance relationship, all at once, is Goal 32 with a press release attached.
I am not telling you a room full of people held a secret meeting and executed a plan. I am telling you the outcomes match a list read into the official record sixty-three years ago, word for word, and that should bother you regardless of which party you vote for.
— THE SCOREBOARD —
Let me put it together the way I would for a test review, because by now you deserve the short version.
The minimum wage: designed by eugenicists to exclude Black workers, still producing that outcome by the data, defended today as anti-racist policy. Racist in origin. Racist in outcome. Democratic policy, unbroken, for ninety years.
Exclusionary zoning: correlated precisely with Black in-migration patterns, enforced hardest in the wealthiest self-described progressive suburbs in the country, walling off the single biggest wealth-building tool in American life. Racist in effect, dressed up as neutral planning.
The Great Society welfare architecture: collapsed Black two-parent households from over 80 percent to below 30 percent in a single generation, after two hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow failed to accomplish the same thing. Racist in outcome regardless of stated intent, and defended for sixty straight years.
The ACA and its expiring subsidies: a legal mandate to purchase from an industry the same party publicly vilifies, with the pain landing hardest on the working poor the moment the party itself let the subsidy lapse. Racist in impact, hypocritical in framing.
The combination of all four: a closed loop. No entry-level job. No affordable house to buy even if you had the income. No path off the welfare program. No spare income once the insurance mandate takes its cut. No path off the program means no path off the voting bloc the program was built to secure. That loop has a name in American history, and it is not a flattering one for the party currently defending every piece of it.
Call it what it is. Not “disparate impact.” Not “systemic inequity” in the passive voice everyone loves to hide behind. Four policies invented or defended by the same party, still doing exactly the job the worst of them were built to do. That is not an insult. That is a citation, four times over.
— CLOSING —
I do not expect the Senator proposing a $25 federal floor to read a single word of Thomas Leonard’s research before his next press conference. I do not expect the sixty-two percent of a KSAT poll to go check what a Big Mac costs after the labor line item doubles, or to go look up their own town’s minimum lot size ordinance. But I would like, just once, to hear a single Democratic politician explain why the policy their party’s own intellectual ancestors built to exclude Black workers from the labor market is the one they still refuse to touch — right alongside the zoning maps, the welfare cliff, and the insurance mandate that keep the resulting dependency permanent and the votes locked in.
Until then, spare me the lecture about who the real racists are. I read the Congressional Record. I read Thomas Leonard. I read the Davis-Bacon debate. I read the zoning studies. You built the cage, one agency at a time. Do not act shocked when someone points at all four locks and reads the label out loud.
But what do I know — I am only a science teacher who reads the primary sources on labor economics, housing policy, and the Congressional Record instead of taking policy advice from a senator proposing a $25 wage floor while the big-box retailers and the zoning boards down the street quietly cheer him on.
IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE this article so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this — every share really helps get the word out. Use it. COMMENT below with your take. Which of these four — wages, zoning, welfare, or the ACA mandate — do you think does the most damage on its own? Tell me.
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Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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