Tuesday, June 4, 2019

AOC: The Dishonest Bartender Comes Home

By Robert Wenzel

This weekend the socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez returned to New York City to bartend for the first time since being elected to United States House of Representatives.

She performed the one woman act show at The Queensboro restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens. And it was an act. The restaurant wasn't short help and she doesn't need the extra money. As a congresswoman, she gets paid $174,000 per year.

It was all about the news cameras that this very media savvy socialist knew would be there for her show.

She told the media that she was there for a day of posing for pictures bartending in support of One Fair Wage, a policy that would force businesses to pay tipped workers a minimum wage of $15 an hour plus tips. Which, of course, would mean the employers would employ fewer tipped workers (supply and demand 101) or add the wage to the customer tab and call the restaurant a "no tip" restaurant, which would do nothing for the former tipped workers other than result in more tax witholding of their income on a weekly basis on top of new union dues wage deductions.

But AOC spun things far away from reality,

“Any job that pays $2.13 an hour is not a job, it’s indentured servitude,” she said. This was her first misleading statement. Although the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour, on the ground she stood in New York City where she made the claim, the minimum wage for tipped workers is $7.50.

But aside from the fact of whether the tipped wage is $2.50 or $7.50, it is dishonest to say as she did that it is indentured servitude to work at the legislated per hour wage when full earnings are far beyond that level when tips are counted. The entire idea behind a separate minimum wage for tipped workers is because tipped workers earn additional income, and some lots of it, far beyond the $2.50 per hour or $7.50 per hour. Bartenders and waiters fight for jobs at top restaurants and bars because of the tips they can earn. It's a career.

The One Fair Wage that she is promoting is a union scam to get more workers under union-negotiated pay (with a nice cut for the unions) instead of the union free tips that bartenders and such now earn.

I do not believe that AOC is unaware of this fact. Let's just say she knows what political machines will be out with get the vote efforts on her behalf at election time so that she will in the future continue in her current government position which will pay her that $174,000 per year.

I further hasten to ask, just what business is it of hers if someone is willing to work for $2.13 per hour or even less? What god has put her in charge of overruling free exchange and supply and demand economics?


Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.


2 comments:

  1. I like to think that the sole purpose of the beaurocrat or the politician is to justify their existence. Legislating social and economic "justice" is a never ending way to do this.

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