[danans]

Lots of rights enjoyed by all today in th US - the most important being voting - were originally established specifically at the exclusion of people of color and women.

The problem wasn't the rights themselves, it's that they were purposely offered to white men only.

Therefore it's deceptive to attack the minimum wage as being any more racist in origin than the right to vote is. Much of the law has deeply racist origins that has only been reformed in recent decades, and even then not completely.

[logicchains]

That's a completely different thing. The minimum wage wasn't originally only offered to white people: it was mandated for everyone, for the purpose of rendering those with lower-paying jobs (people of color, immigrants) unemployed, or preventing them from competing with whites. The briefing paper at https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/bp017.pdf discusses this.

"The law provided that all federal construction contractors with contracts inexcess of $5,000 or more must pay their workers the "prevailing wage," which in practice meant the wages ofunionized labor. The measure passed because Congressmen saw the bill as protection for local, unionized[12] white workers' salaries in the fierce labor market of the Depression.[13] In particular, white union workers were angry that black workers who were barred from unions were migrating to the North in search of jobs in the building trades and undercutting "white" wages.[14] The comments of various congressmen reveal the racial animus that motivated the sponsors and supporters of the bill. In 1930, Representative John J. Cochran of Missouri stated that he had "received numerous complaints in recent months about southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South."[15] Representative Clayton Allgood, supporting Davis-Bacon on the floor of the House, complained of "cheap colored labor" that "is in competition with white labor throughout the country."[16]"

[danans]

> it was mandated for everyone, for the purpose of rendering those with lower-paying jobs (people of color, immigrants) unemployed

So it was mandated for "everyone", but by your own description, not really, because it adjusted another variable - who had a job - by race, which is practically the same thing as being racially exclusionary.

This is not so different to how black people in theory got the right to vote after the Civil War, but practically were excluded from voting in many areas until just 50 years ago.

[AndrewUnmuted]

No, it is very different from that. The right to vote in that case was denied purely based upon racial boundaries - it's not like poor white people couldn't vote in the South.

Minimum wage is much more underhanded than that, because it was passed in the name of fairness but it was really just to protect entrenched workers against an incoming wave of competition.

These labor protections in the US are what initially got so many working-class white Americans on board with the progressive agenda in the first place.

[danans]

> Minimum wage is much more underhanded than that, because it was passed in the name of fairness but it was really just to protect entrenched workers against an incoming wave of competition.

was much more underhanded, not is.

Who cares how it started? Again, many rights we have today started out either explicitly or implicitly limited by race.

Today, the minimum wage is very much about fairness to low wage workers of any race, but especially low income people of color, who are over-represented at the bottom end of the income ladder.

If you arguing against that, you'd be arguing that today's progressive movement is secretly about preserving jobs only for white people, which would be extremely far fetched. It seems more like you are trying to foist the racist rationale for minimum wage from yesteryear upon the far more equitable purpose it serves today, in an perhaps underhanded attempt to discredit today's version.

If you're going to argue against today's minimum wage, you should use arguments relevant to today, i.e. the usual ones you hear from its opponents about how it will bankrupt businesses, and rob the poor of the incentive to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

[AndrewUnmuted]

What about the person who wants to sell their services at a rate lower than what the government has deemed allowable? Where are their rights in this scenario?

[danans]

In that case, they can be a self employed independent contractor.