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RUSH: Here is Erica in Nashville, North Carolina. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’m very nervous, so I’m gonna try to spit this out and hope it makes sense. Longtime listener. I love your program. I love pretty much every opinion that you have on everything. The reason I’m calling, I was thinking about the protests in the street, or across the nation about raising the minimum wage, and some are wanting it raised to $15. So I was thinking about it about how many people are gonna be affected by Obamacare. You know, are their full-time hours being cut to part time? And if minimum wage is doubled, then someone’s 40 hours are being cut to 20 hours doesn’t matter, because their paycheck will be the same. They’re about to get double their pay.

RUSH: That’s exactly right, and that’s why I said yesterday, this is not a legitimate protest on behalf of workers at Mickey D’s who feel like they are underpaid. This is an organized, rent-a-mob type of thing in order to advance the leftist agenda, that it’s part and parcel with Obamacare. But the minimum wage argument and the fast-food jobs are almost in a rotation. That’s calendared, and they come up so often, the Democrats just execute the plan regardless.

And, you know, this is just part of the never-ending assault on every day life that the left conducts in this country. They cannot allow a day or two to go by where there isn’t a crisis, where there isn’t some major problem on the verge of destroying somebody’s life. So they came up with McDonald’s and talk about it’s not a livable wage. It’s the same old argument over and over again.

But I pointed this out yesterday for every one of you sympathetic because you don’t understand the minimum wage, and you don’t understand compensation in general. If they’ve got you sucked in — if you think that the people working the fry machine or the fry cooks or the salesclerks in McDonald’s are underpaid — you just need to ask yourself one question: “When you go in to buy a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder, are you willing to pay double so that the people working there can get a raise?”

And if you aren’t, then you need to reexamine your understanding of how all of this works.

Because the people that own Mickey D’s don’t just have piles of money in the back that they’re hoarding and trying to keep away from their employees because they’re mean and they don’t like their employees and they really hope their employees have miserable lives. They’re trying to stay in business. Across the street’s a Burger King or something else that’s trying to sell for lower prices than what they have.

It’s called competition, and if Mickey D’s raises the price of a Quarter Pounder and you can go get a Whopper for a lot less, where are you gonna go? So Mickey D’s is like everything else. They’re intricately involved in the market, and you just can’t run around and arbitrarily set the cost of anything, and the minimum wage is an arbitrary cost in business. Look at it in another way.

Instead of asking for the minimum wage to go up because it’s compassionate or makes you feel good, why don’t you go in and demand that a Big Mac only costs half what it costs now? ‘Cause it’s just too expensive. You can’t afford it. Why don’t you do that? Or why don’t you, as I say, agree to pay double what it costs? But any time you want to go into any business and arbitrarily set the value of something in that business, you’re going to affect everything else that happens.

But everything else, price-wise, is attacked by the market, which includes all kinds of factors. Competition, shipping costs, traveling costs, refrigeration, costs. It’s just so involved that you can’t arbitrarily set the price of anything without totally throwing everything out of whack, including the price of labor. But when you go in and think you’re making a really compassionate statement, you really feel good about yourself, ’cause you think the people that work there are underpaid, and you want ’em to get paid more?

Well, you have a role in that, and your role is higher prices.

And if you’re unwilling to pay higher prices, then shut up.

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