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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

>The subminimum wage, again, is sort of a legacy of the racist and sexist creation of minimum wage policies in this country,”

It's kind of crazy how much liberty authors of studies have these days to speak outside the scope of their study. This explanation is handwavey at best or downright fraught if you actually look into the history of said rules.

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That history being that minimum wage was partly motivated by attempts to exclude Black workers from the job market. Same thing with gun control—it was efforts to disarm freed slaves. (Colonial powers disarmed their colonies too.)

Of course there are non-racist reasons for both the minimum wage and gun control! But these “taint by association with racism” arguments are always deployed in an extremely selective way. The Senate is racist because it supposedly was to help slave holding states (which isn’t true) but gun control isn’t racist even though it was definitely popularized in response to the perceived threat of armed Black men.

It’s kind of crazy how you think free speech takes a back seat to your sensibilities.

No one else has to live in your mental box.

I don't see how you can read the parent comment and conclude that he commenter wants "free speech" to "take a back seat". It's one thing to make unfounded claims outside your field of expertise on your personal blog or whatever, it's another thing entirely to do the same thing but on a report for a respectable organization.

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