W. Todd Akin: “there is a cynic that once said that one of the things that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.…”

“there is a cynic that once said that one of the things that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I don't accept that entirely, but it certainly appears to be that way on the floor of the U.S. Congress today. You don't have to look in the recent past; you go back to 1640 in England. And they had wage and price controls. They thought it was a compassionate thing to set a price on a loaf of bread, a day's labor and a ton of coal. Then the Black Death came along and killed a whole lot of their workforce, and the price for a day's labor remained the same. England and their economy languished until a guy came along that the Brits don't even like by the name of Oliver Cromwell, and he abolished all of the government wage and price controls, and the economy surged. The effect of an increase of 40 percent on minimum wage is going to be several things. The first thing it is going to do is: any job between the current minimum wage and the $7 is going to do one of several things. First, it will be exported overseas. If it is not exported, it will be taken on the black market by, perhaps, some illegal immigrant who is willing to work for less than the minimum wage. Or it will just be passed on to everybody as an increase in cost of living. Those are the alternatives. It would be very nice if we could, by mandate from this floor, say that everybody is going to make a lot more than that. Why not $20 an hour?”