Continuing the practice of replacing what works with what sounds good.
Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics admits to finding “a decline in the number of weeks of employment for younger workers with disabilities after the ADA became effective.”
One thing that the law did do was increase the number of people willing to identify as disabled, which you might think would thereby reduce the number of unemployed disabled people, just as a statistical artifact. In fact, depending on how you define disabled, roughly half the population of disabled people remains jobless. It remains today a great barrier to inclusion of disabled people in the workforce, though hardly anyone is willing to admit it. The ADA is even being invoked as a reason to take down free online coursework, if you can believe it.
What a tragedy.
Government Is the Enemy of the Disabled
Government had become the ultimate “ableist” institution.But actually, none of this should surprise us. History’s greatest gains for the disabled community came in the age of laissez faire in the 19th century, when private philanthropy invented Braille and new schools and accommodations for the disabled were established. There was a huge growth in global cooperation to bring new dignity to their lives. Philanthropists made this a cause. Governments didn’t participate.
But late in the 19th century, a wicked new ideology came along that essentially plotted the extermination of the disabled. It was called eugenics. Science at the time was said to demonstrate that these people needed to be excluded, segregated, prevented from propagating their kind, and finally exterminated. It was a war on the weak and it lasted for decades, in every state at every level of policy. The minimum wage – which established a high bar for getting into the professional workforce – was part of the exterminationist plot.
Government had become the ultimate “ableist” institution, just as it had become the primary practitioner of racism and misogyny. All this malice was baked into the law and promoted at the highest levels of academia and government. (It still is: try being disabled and navigating an airport security line, much less getting arrested.)
The thinking had already begun to change by the late 1930s, thanks in part to the realization that the president of the US himself had a polio-related disability. So the power of government turned from exterminating to “helping.” But actually it didn’t help at all. More power, more money, more regulation, more mandates only served to further the eugenics cause. All the “good intentions” in the world wouldn’t change the outcome.
The Sub-Minimum Wage
If you are disabled now, it it extremely difficult to get a job. To employ you at any wage will cost a business far more than a fully abled employee. And business darn sure can’t have disabled people volunteer to work without pay, for that is said to be exploitation. However, there is still one saving grace in the law. Business is permitted to pay a subminimum wage today. It takes paperwork and it’s not easy but it can be done.
Along comes Hillary Clinton, crazy ideology in hand, to get rid of that too. She has called it “a vestige from an ugly, ignorant past” and vows to mandate higher wages for everyone. And that is that: justice with the stroke of a pen.
Except that it is cruel and terrible and will throw more disabled people out of work. And if she wants to talk about “an ugly, ignorant past,” she should have a look at the history of eugenics that her beloved government (and her beloved progressive movement) tried to bring about just 100 years ago. Here we find the real effect of government power on the weak.
For the sake of justice and morality, government needs to get completely out of the disability business. Too many lives are at stake. Human dignity is at stake. Please just stop “helping” these blessed souls.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
