Last week, I wrote a brilliant piece arguing that we should stop mewing kids up in government child-custodial facilities, and let them go out to work. But there's a problem.

Who is going to want to pay kids minimum wage?  Is a 13-year-old worth $7.65 an hour, let alone the proposed $10.10 per hour or magnificent $15 per hour that liberal politicians like Seattle's Kshama Sawant advocated and the Seattle City Council passed?

And yet “In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released in early August, 60% of respondents said addressing income inequality by increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 would have a “positive” effect on the economy.”

In San Diego, the local business community is pushing back against the minimum-wage campaign with a petition drive. Who do you think is leading the campaign? Why, it's independent bookseller Ann Kinner. “It’s coming out my pocket, it’s going to come out of your pocket,” she says. And guess what: the peaceful pro-minimum-wage protesters are harassing the petition signature gatherers.

Compare them with the Occupy Wall Street protesters that investment guru Peter Schiff talked to in 2011. The Occupiers, it appeared, want a government that would hold a gun to the head of their employers.

That is the immovable object facing any program of conservative reform.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad. The Peace folks, that once chided us for an inordinate fear of communism and are more concerned about Islamophobia than advocating against the anti-woman and anti-gay culture in the Muslim world, believe in wagin' holy war on employers.

The Peace crowd say that war never solved anything in international affairs; instead they believe that a war on evil burger joints and independent bookstores will set the world to rights.

And I thought liberals loved independent bookstores.

So right now, while Jonah Goldberg writes darkly about an “Interregnum” in international affairs and Peggy Noonan complains that nobody knows what the president is trying to do in foreign policy, we have lefty activists in full cry all across the nation demanding an increase in the minimum wage as the cure for inequality and a sluggish economy. And people believe them!  Liberal journalist Norah O'Donnell asks Republican candidate Thom Tillis in North Carolina if a minimum wage of $7.65 an hour is “enough.” Got any settled science on that, Norah?

And what about the children?

After two hundred years of a capitalism that has lifted the average person from an income of $3 per day to $100 per day, you would think that the educated, evolved people would have decided that the science was settled. You would think, as in the golden days of the civil rights era, that the educated ruling class, including its pretty faces on TV, would have imposed its enlightened view on the bitter clingers, the people that still insist that economic prosperity issues from the phone and the pen and the “stash” of the chief magistrate. But no.

Here we are in the sixth year of hope and change. The average person thinks that the way to educate children is to force them all to school, that the way to prepare for retirement is to force everyone to give their money to politicians, that the way to universal health care is to force everyone to get health insurance. And the average person thinks that the way to help the unskilled is to force employers to pay them more money.

I don't blame the untutored white working-class man, bombarded with cunning catchphrases, for thinking that force is the answer to economic stagnation. But there is no excuse for a tenured professor or a college graduate. Any educated person should have taken Economics 101, should have read up on economic history, should have seen through the economic rubbish of every left-wing thinker from Marx to Zinn. That's what a liberal education is all about, right? It equips a man to tell wisdom from folly, and worse.

A modern educated elitist should at least equal the judgment of orphan Alexander Hamilton, who never finished college, who determined at age 26 that the new nation needed a central bank, a national debt, and a national revenue, at 32 wrote most of the Federalist Papers, and at age 36 persuaded the First Congress to let him implement his debt refinancing plan; otherwise what was all that education for?

If our educated geniuses can't match the “bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar” what's the point of them?

Here's what I believe. Force is the way to deal with Commies and Islamists and thug dictators.  Peaceful cooperation is the way to deal with businesses, consumers, workers, other Americans, and kids that aren't yet skilled enough to be worth a special-interest sponsored minimum wage.

Do you think anyone would dare to run on that platform in 2016?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.