Last Saturday, Citizens to Uproot Racism in Bermuda (CURB) had a tag day, and I happily made a small contribution and now display their tag on my motorcycle.

My small donation brought to mind the opinion piece written by Lynne Winfield, vice president of CURB, published by The Royal Gazette on March 1.

This was an eloquent plea for “a living wage” and it did make a reasonably compelling case for such a policy.

The phrase “living wage” is loaded with sympathy and the milk of human kindness, and anyone who objects to it must, by definition, be a Scrooge or have no sympathy with or for the disadvantaged of society. They might even be heartless, uncaring or even (gasp) racist.

Warm, fuzzy words have a great advantage over logical economic analysis, especially if the idea has no specific meaning.

“Living wage” is a fantastic marketing slogan which appeals to a large number of people.

However, social daydreamers on financial matters ultimately get mugged by economic realities.

The harsh reality is that those who favour a living wage end up damaging the very people they say they are helping and, just as important, they increase the power of bureaucrats and politicians over taxpayers. Yep, these are the selfsame guys who behave like spoiled brats in the House of Assembly, or go on marches to intimidate taxpayers.

The idea of a living wage or its equivalent, a minimum wage, is not a new idea.

Indeed, President Obama in his 2015 State of the Union speech called for a minimum-wage hike and for government-mandated paid family and medical leave.

“We are the only advanced country on Earth,” said the President, “that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers.”

On the minimum wage, President Obama issued this challenge: “To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: if you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.”

Minimum wage and paid family leave are not only moral imperatives, said the President, but also good economics.

Ms Winfield clearly agrees, and she cited economics professor Paul Krugman to support her case. Prof Krugman is now a hired political adviser and not a practising economist, but I am sure he wishes he had not made the undernoted statement in 1998 (admittedly some years ago) when he reviewed a book that supported the living wage, entitled The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy.

At that time, Prof Krugman hammered the idea: “The living wage movement is simply a move to raise minimum wages through local action. So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages?

Any economics 101 student can tell you the answer: the higher wage reduces the quantity of labour demanded, and hence leads to unemployment.”

His statement could not be clearer, and is the position of about 90 per cent of the economics profession. He has changed his mind because the political guy who now pays his salary wants some intellectual support for what is a rotten idea.

Why is it bad? The answer is in the paragraph above — it leads to unemployment.

The statistics are compelling. Everywhere, and every time, a living wage is put into effect by law it leads to unemployment, especially of young people, and even more especially of young black males, whose unemployment rate in large American cities is in the 40 per cent range, and similarly in other countries such as South Africa, where minimum wage rates apply.

It is also bad because when young people are deprived of a job through well-meaning but misguided laws they not only lose a monetary wage, they are not given the opportunity to learn valuable lessons in such critical areas as showing up on time, following instructions, handling responsibilities, and making contacts in the world of jobs.

It would be fantastic if everyone earned more (including me), but perfection is not something one comes across in this world very often. Young and unskilled people do indeed earn low wages, but this is a spur to get off their backsides and become more skilled and in so doing, earn higher wages which arise from high productivity, not government laws.

Government laws are ineffective when clashing with economic laws, because in the end reality always wins.

Increase the price of anything, including wages, and, all other things being equal, less of that thing will be demanded.

Critical as the principles of supply and demand are in the determination of wage rates, what interested me most was the lack of understanding by Ms Winfield of the terrible historical antecedents of the living (or minimum) wage.

I would recommend for her spare time reading a book entitled The Economics of the Colour Bar by WH Hutt, an economics professor, who spent many years at the University of Cape Town in the 1950s, until he was deported by the then apartheid government for opposing the views of the white-dominated trade unions who advocated a minimum wage for gold miners in order to forestall the wishes of employers who wanted to employ blacks.

The reason for legislating a high minimum wage was to put pressure on mainly white employers not to employ black labour and to keep them in a position of subservience.

That tactic of using the minimum wage to keep uppity blacks out of the labour force was also used by unions in the United States.

A minimum wage of say $10 an hour makes it unprofitable for an employer to hire someone who is unskilled and who produces say only $8 an hour.

Because a higher percentage of black workers than white workers are unskilled, black workers are more likely to be put out of work by a minimum wage and the facts support this conclusion.

The left-leaning Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, in his book An American Dilemma, estimated that minimum wages established under the American New Deal of the 1930s had made half a million black workers unemployed. This is a perfect example of good intentions leading to horrible consequences. It hard to believe that President Obama 80 years later is proposing to do exactly that. And that the vice-president of CURB is suggesting the same thing. Compassion and Santa Claus economics cannot trump harsh financial truths.

Although not explicit as the President, she is impliedly saying exactly what racist US Congressman Clayton Allgood said in the 1930s that “cheap coloured labour was in competition with white labour throughout the country” and that this should be ended by bringing in minimum wage legislation.

However, the historical position is even worse than what I have said above.

Henry Rogers Seager, president of the American Economic Association, in his 1913 essay The Theory of the Minimum Wage, made it clear that the implementation of a minimum or a living wage would discourage the hiring of undesirables (such as Blacks, Jews and Catholics and other inferior beings) and therefore the number of children that they would produce.

The minimum wage was a major weapon of the eugenics movement in the early 20th century to keep inferior races at the margins of society.

Recommending policies that restrict jobs for black labour seems to be an extraordinary position for a leading member of CURB to take. Rather than uprooting racism, such policies would encourage it.

May I also suggest for the reading of Ms Winfield the works of two highly regarded black economists, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, both of whom have written extensively on the subject of “the living wage” and its destructive impact on black workers.

In conclusion, may I just question why on earth anyone would favour a policy that says if a worker cannot find a job that pays, say, at least $10 per hour, he is not allowed to work? Which is better, a job at $8.50 per hour or no job at all at $10 per hour.

If raising the living wage to $10 makes sense, why stop there? Why not declare that everyone must be paid $50 an hour or even $500?

I suspect the answer to my questions is contained in this quotation from the poet TS Elliot (which I found in a book by the black economist Thomas Sowell): “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”