This incisive article, Minimum Wages Had a Eugenic Intent, discusses the true intent of minimum wage laws from the most noted and prominent economists of the Progressive Era. (Open and view this slide-show on Excluding Inferior Workers: Eugenic Influences on Economic Reform in The Progressive Era, in a new window) Like their modern day descendants in the academy, media and institutional welfare state bureaucracy they were obsessed with racial, gender, and other categories of identity politics (but not in the way that today’s totalitarian progressives would understand.) Progressivism has always been destructive and evil. In 1883, the English statistician and social scientist Francis Galton coined the word “eugenics” (“well-born,” from Greek). The term referred to his idea of selectively breeding people to enhance “desirable” and eliminate “undesirable” properties. Seen as following Darwin’s theory of evolution, in the 1920s and ’30s eugenics gained important backing in England and the United States. Scientists and physicians spoke and wrote in its support. It influenced U.S. immigration policy, and states like Virginia used it to justify the forcible sterilization of the intellectually disabled.