While I appreciate your ability to actually do research to find facts you think support your position (it actually doesn’t, but supports my position in many ways), you manage to avoid doing the research that might disprove your beliefs. The history of the minimum wage is easy enough to look up.
Early progressives saw the minimum wage as an overall eugenicist package. The minimum wage was supposed to make it more difficult for “undesirables” to get jobs. Since they didn’t believe themselves to be complete barbarians, they proposed the creation of welfare to take care of those people, public housing to concentrate them, and “family planning” — which included abortion and sterilization — to reduce their population. Immigrants were also generally considered to be “undesirables.” The fact, though, is that they were targeted because they were bidding down wages, and the white unions didn’t like that. A rising tide does lift all boats — so long as people aren’t actively trying to drill holes in your boat.
Now, if opposing policies and institutions because they have a historical basis in racism and continue to have racist outcomes makes me a SJW, then I’m more than happy to take on that label. I will note, however, that I will almost certainly be the only SJW who opposes the minimum wage and welfare, and who will point out the racist foundations of Planned Parenthood.
Now, as for free trade and China…
If I find out that my neighbor is harming himself and his family because he’s a cocaine addict, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense for me to teach him a lesson by becoming a cocaine addict myself and harming myself and my own family. If the Chinese government wants to harm its economy by driving up prices, it doesn’t make any sense at all to turn around and say, “Oh yeah! We’ll show you! We’ll also drive up prices and harm our economy! Take that!”
The benefits of specialization and trade is as applicable to groups of people, including nations, as it is to individuals. If another individual can make clothes better than you can, and you can grow corn better than they can, it makes sense to specialize and trade. Both of you will be better off, and you will both be more productive. This is equally true for countries. There are places where mining coal is cheaper, and other places where mining iron ore is cheaper, and other places where making steel is cheaper, and other places where making cars is cheaper. It makes sense to let those places do what they do best and cheapest, while we do what we do best and cheapest, then trade. The principles of mutual benefit from free trade apply at all scales. It doesn’t make sense for you to put tariffs on Kroger so that I can be more profitable growing vegetables in my back yard. All you’re doing is making me poorer.
Free trade doesn’t require everyone doing it. It just means your country does it. If those other countries want to shoot themselves in the foot, let them. It’s another thing entirely for corporations to get their government to invade a country because that country didn’t allow that corporation to open up shop there. That’s not free trade at all. That’s mercantilism. While I applaud your opposition to that kind of mercantilism (though you mistake it for free trade), you still support mercantilism in the form of tariffs. Get out of your medieval mindset when it comes to economics and fully embrace free markets. Mercantilism is awful, no matter how you cut it. Be consistent and completely oppose it.
As for immigration restrictions, sure, once we leave out all of the explicitly racist restrictions, we’re left with only nationalist excuses. Except that nationalism is, well, racist. It’s necessarily exclusionary of other people, as are all forms of collectivism. Racism, nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, sexism are all facets of the same die. If opposing racism, nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and racism makes me a SJW, then, again, I’m happy to be called exactly that. Which, again, would really surprise most SJWs. Recognizing that there are institutional reinforcers of racism and noting the historical foundations of those institutions doesn’t make one a SJW. It makes one a classical liberal and a humanist, as I am concerned with liberty and all of humanity.
