Leftist news organizations have helped boost Obama’s efforts to shore up his failures in creating jobs by raising the minimum wage. These efforts defy free market realities that would force employees to hire fewer people if made to artificially pay employees more than the market rate.
One of their favorite targets has been Walmart, who is the largest employer in America outside of the federal government. But when the economic illiterates at The Nation went after Sam Walton’s company, it fought back! Walmart’s senior director of communications sent this email with the heading, “people who live in glass houses…”
The Nation—“America’s leading progressive print and online magazine”—recently encouraged its readers to sign an open letter demanding that Walmart increase wages to $12/hour and this article called our company one of the “biggest abusers of low-wage labor.”
In an ironic twist, ProPublica recently reported that starting this fall, “interns at the Nation Institute will be paid minimum wage for the first time in the history of the 30-year-old program.” As ProPublica noted, The Nation has been paying its full-time interns a weekly stipend of $150 per week—less than the current federal minimum wage rate of $7.25 per hour.
In fact, assuming the interns working a 40-hour week, the pay would come to $3.75 an hour! So that’s awkward.
But it gets better!
Seething that they had been trolled so effectively by one the largest corporations in the world, the editors at The Nation momentarily interrupted their massages, put down their cuban cigars, and rang their golden servant bells to summon their underpaid, malnourished interns to respond angrily to those corporate monsters!
From the famished interns at The Nation:
The internship program is an educational, time-limited engagement that provides a unique training ground for participants at the very start of their careers. Additionally, The Nation Institute is a small non-profit trying to raise money to support serious public interest journalism in a challenging fundraising landscape.
All of those descriptors they applied to internships all apply to entry-level jobs everywhere. It doesn’t matter that Walmart has to survive in a challenging corporate landscape, I suppose.
The socialist overlords at The Nation are now paying interns minimum wage – still less than the average Walmart pays it’s employees!
But wait, there’s more!
In a statement to Propublica, The Nation confirmed one of the basic criticisms that conservatives, and our faithful sidekick, logic, make about raising the minimum wage:
“We are not yet certain how this will work out long term, but for the fall we are anticipating hiring ten interns rather than twelve.”
So you raised the wages of your employees, and had to hire fewer people because of it?
No one saw that coming.
