They know good and well they're not some kind of champions of the downtrodden

John F. DiLeo at the Illinois Review has a great piece on the minimum-wage demonstration a handful of bussed-in protestors staged at the McDonald's shareholders meeting in Oak Brook.  He looks at a sampling of three demonstrators (they must have been quoted in the Chicago Tribune article that inspired him to write the piece): a 35-year-old minimum-wage employee at a McDonald's store in Kansas (where did he get the bread for the bus fare and lodging?), a lady who strives mightily to find a racial angle to the issue, and a SEIU agitator.

He then makes the point that should be front and center in discussions of fast-food wages: the fact that the minimum wage is for entry-level positions, and people generally advance from those pretty quickly, sometimes, if they like that company and field, rising to management level, and maybe even becoming a franchise owner.

But the part I'd like to share here is DiLeo's summary of what this kind of hissy fit is really all about:

• It’s a campaign to help the dying anachronistic trade union movement to come back from the dead. 
• It’s a campaign to crush the American franchise system by regulating small businesses exactly like we regulate deep-pocketed big businesses.
• It’s a campaign to keep the poor where they are, dependent on government for their housing and food and education. 
• It’s a campaign to stop upward mobility in the private sector. 
• It’s a campaign to rob our nation, once and for all, from any claim to the wonderful benefits of a free market economy.

The vanguard and the useful idiots: the two main elements revolutionaries need to take a crowbar to the normal-people economy.