I’ve shot down the stupidity of minimum-wage law idolization on Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show before, but I merely wanted to draw attention to perfectly succinct and facepalm-worthy gem of a demonstration of progressives arbitrarily declaring a number that they deem “fair” to satisfy their minimum-wage whims, because how else could workers possibly be protected from the ostensible caprice of business owners and free-market signals? The real question, of course, is who is going to protect American workers from the ‘unintended’ (but entirely predictable) consequences of top-down liberal vagaries? Via RCP:

And by the way, I want to tell you something. We need to raise the minimum wage. That will make a huge difference out there. People are struggling. The difference between the wealthy and the working poor has grown. We raise that minimum wage, and we move forward with the vision of this president that we have, which is: Everyone pays their fair share, we make investments where it matters. We’re going to be — this is going to be a great century for us. … I think about $10. I think that would be right.

(This was all during a segment, by the way, about how California’s economy is doing relatively fine because, hey, that’s exactly what happens when “the wealthy are paying their fair share” and the state legislature has a Democratic supermajority to run the place. You’d think the segment was a self-parody of Democratic talking points, except that, astonishingly, it isn’t.)

It first sounded pretty random when President Obama suggested raising the national minimum wage to $9/hour in his State of the Union address last February, but Democrats have been casually picking up on the issue. I’m thinking that they’re going to try to to turn it into a major campaign issue for 2014 as yet another way to beat Republicans over the head with what Democrats portray as their horrendous, spiteful apathy for the working poor. It’s just too bad that, here in the real world and not on MSNBC la-la-land, there are few policies that have proved as directly damaging for economic prosperity and precisely wrong way to lift the working poor.