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Health & Fitness

WHO Radio's Libertarian Talk Show Host Jan Mickelson Supports Big Raise in Minimum Wage

"You'll never believe what I just heard," my husband said as he emerged from the bedroom and joined me in the kitchen. 

I'd been listening to National Public Radio, and he was napping in the bedroom listening to WHO radio's Libertarian talk show host Jan Mickelson.

Mickelson proposed a raise in the minimum wage to $12.50 an hour, unlike Beth Cody, a Libertarian in Iowa City who published a recent column in the Iowa City Press-Citizen claiming that some workers aren't worth the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

I'd just been reading Tom Frank's book again, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Hearts of America, in which he relates how a populist state like Kansas sold out their own economic interests for conservative social issues. I wondered if the "populist" Tea Party would ever get it.

We turned on Mickelson's show in the living room and listened together. He spoke of "scumbag fill-in-the-blank big box stores" who pay their workers low wages supplemented by the safety net provided by taxpayers who provide the food stamps, Medicaid, subsidized housing, and other benefits that amounted to $2.1 billion a year for Walmart workers alone several years ago.

He said if we raised the minimum wage to $12.50 an hour, a family living wage, illegals would stop coming over the border to take jobs paying next to nothing or nothing in the case of wage-stealing employers (don't think it doesn't happen, because it does). A higher minimum wage would incentivize people to work instead of staying on the dole, and taxpayers wouldn't be subsidizing "scumbag corporations" who depend on taxpayers to cover for them.

Now that's populism! And I never thought I'd hear it from Jan Mickelson. Even more surprisingly, there were commenters on his show who agreed with him. You think some Libertarians and Republicans in Iowa are starting to get it?

It's not smart to punish the working poor and the long-term unemployed. It hurts all of us in one way or another. The safety net is costly to all of us and stagnant wages are a way of stealing increased productivity from workers who contribute a lot to rising profits in corporations who reward those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom as well as at the expense of their shareholders. 

Hurray for the newly populist Libertarian, Jan Mickelson!

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