Shocking. Why have they hidden their light under a bushel for all these years?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday delayed action on legislation raising the minimum wage, the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2014 agenda.
[snip]
Reid has not yet unified his caucus on the issue, which is a constant in the Democrats’ election-year playbook. Of the 55 senators who caucus with the Democrats, only 32 have signed on as official co-sponsors of Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) bill.
(H/T: Hot Air) The ostensible problem was a CBO (a org that the Left can never decide is good or bad these days) report promising that this measure would lose half a million jobs. But the real problem is that Democratic politicians have never been able to gently explain to their more activist members that business owners do not have Scrooge McDuck swimming pools full of gold coins. I know that this sounds unbelievable, but trust me: many progressives really do think that prices are high simply because capitalists take ‘too much’ profits. That a business like, say, oil production could be seeing most of its revenues go out in overhead (ESPECIALLY taxes) seems to be absolutely alien to them, as a whole.
But you have to understand: many of the Left’s theoreticians lack critical educational or life experiences that would help them properly understand economics. Very few of them have owned a business, worked directly for a small business owner, and/or experienced what we in this country laughingly call ‘poverty.’ The closest most of them have come are a variety of retail jobs that were abandoned the moment something better came along – or, more likely, they got boring. Couple that with the usual lack of empathy* and you get this kind of failure to communicate.
Oh, well. Back to the drawing board! …Which is going to be a little bare on the Democrats’ side, given that it’s an election year, but such is life.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*It’s not that academic progressives are sociopaths. Seriously, it’s not. But the problem is that it is trivially easy for an academic to cocoon him- or herself into a nice, tight liberal bubble, and absolutely impossible to create a conservative bubble. Those poor people simply don’t know any better; they’re like children raised by wolves and then forced to interact with regular humans. We’re just really, really scary to them, that’s all – and they don’t have the concepts that allow them to articulate why.
More like humans raised by a covey of quail a human raised by wolves would have a better understanding of human society.
Man is a wolf to his fellow man.
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For good or for ill.
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My read of his metaphor is that it might be more literally correct read as dolphins, transient orca, or swans.