(Schiff)—The real minimum wage is always zero. Restaurant workers in California are about to find that out the hard way.
Minimum wage laws are politically popular. According to the narrative, benevolent politicians raise the minimum to force greedy businesses to pay their workers a decent wage. It sounds great, doesn’t it? It seems like a victory for the little guy.
The problem is you can’t suspend economic laws by government edict.
One of the biggest enduring economic myths is the notion that the minimum wage laws only help workers and have no real negative effects. The fallacy inherent in this line of thinking becomes immediately clear if we simply propose a $ 1,000-per-hour minimum wage. After all, if $20 is good, $1,000 would be fantastic, right?
Of course, nobody would pay a worker $1,000 per hour to perform a low-skill task. You’d never get any kind of return on that investment, and it’s obviously unaffordable. A $15 per hour minimum is just slightly less unaffordable. It’s only a matter of scale.
The smaller scale of a hike to $15 makes the effects much less obvious – sometimes completely invisible. But the same fundamental economic reasons a $1,000 per hour minimum wage would never work make a $15 minimum just as economically unviable.
Nevertheless, as long as we have politicians, they will pander to “workers” and pass these economically damaging laws. And as long as there are minimum wage laws on the books, some low-productivity workers will go without jobs.
A wage is nothing more than the price of labor. And labor is subject to the laws of supply and demand. When you raise the price of something, demand falls. That means raising the price to hire somebody will ultimately mean fewer people get hired.
It’s critical to understand that governments can force employers to pay you minimum wage. But they can’t force a company to hire you.
CALIFORNIA: A REAL WORLD EXAMPLE
California workers are going to learn this economic lesson the hard way.
A $20 per hour minimum wage for restaurant workers in California will go into effect in April. To cope with the increased cost of labor, two Pizza Hut operators plan to eliminate delivery service. That means some 1,200 delivery drivers will go from making their current wage to earning zero.
“PacPizza, LLC, operating as Pizza Hut, has made a business decision to eliminate first-party delivery services and, as a result, the elimination of all delivery driver positions,” the company said in a statement.
Southern California Pizza Co. also gave notice that it will discontinue delivery service.
Restaurant industry analyst Mark Kalinowski told Business Insider that he expects “more harm to come” from the law as fast food chains “take action in an attempt to blunt the impact of higher labor costs.”
Some of that pain will fall on customers. Pizza lovers will now have to pick up their orders or depend on third-party delivery services such as DoorDash and Uber Eats. Meanwhile, McDonald’s and Chipotle have already indicated that they will raise menu prices.
Gov. Gavin Newsome signed the FAST Act into law in 2022. The original plan would have raised the fast food industry minimum wage to $23 per hour. In a compromise, a law passed last year set the wage at $20. The wage applies to California-based fast-food chains with 60 or more locations nationwide.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH A MINIMUM WAGE?
Nick Giambruno did a good job of explaining the problem with minimum wages in an article published by the International Man. He points out that minimum wage laws are simply price controls.
In this case, a control on the price of labor. And price controls always create destructive distortions in the market. Here, that means unnecessary unemployment and artificially high prices passed on to consumers. Even the Congressional Budget Office admits that 500,000 jobs would be lost if the US government raised the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10.”
Giambruno illustrates this point by making a comparison that’s easy to wrap your head around. Imagine if the government set the minimum price for an aluminum can at $5. In that scenario, Coca-Cola would have to charge over $5 for a can of Coke. Would you shell out more than five bucks for a can of Coke?
Me neither.
In this scenario, we’d end up with a glut of Coke cans sitting on store shelves.
In this scenario, the problem isn’t that people don’t want Coke. They do. The problem is the artificially high price of aluminum cans… which leads to the artificially high price of Coke… that just sits on shelves, gathering dust, until eventually, Coca-Cola drastically cuts back production because of lack of demand.”
In all likelihood, Coca-Cola would just switch to exclusively using glass or plastic containers. The $5 minimum can price that was supposed to help the can companies would actually hurt them over the long term.
Now, just substitute aluminum cans for labor and you have the same scenario.
A similar dynamic plays out when the government mandates the price of labor. But instead of Coke cans, potential employees sit on the shelves while employers eliminate jobs they otherwise wouldn’t, and are forced to pass on higher prices to consumers when they otherwise wouldn’t. The plain truth is, not every job generates $15 an hour worth of output. And some workers would much rather accept jobs that pay less than $15 than have no job at all.”
Minimum wage advocates seek to solve a legitimate problem facing American workers: their dollars buy less and less every year. But simply mandating employers fork over more dollars is a little like putting a band-aid on an amputation. It doesn’t do anything to address the underlying problem. We don’t have a wage problem. We have a money problem.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.