By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large

Apparently, $15 an hour for assisting people with their burger-and-fries orders isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. What a shocker.

All this time, we thought that the burden, substantial though it is, was going to be felt primarily by the businesses, and also by consumers, to whom the increased costs of doing business are so often passed along…but who had any idea that the beneficiaries of such increases, the workers themselves, would be so put upon by having received these pay raises?

Well, it turns out they are. In Seattle, which can’t seem to embrace efforts at utopian socialism fast enough, the reality of earning a full week of pay at the higher rate means that many folks no longer qualify for government assistance, like welfare and food stamps. As a matter of fact, some area employees are going to their bosses and asking for fewer hours, now that they’re receiving a higher hourly wage, so as to remain under the threshold for assistance qualification.

Additionally, businesses and consumers in Seattle are finding the contrived elevation of unskilled worker pay is working just as predicted; some are closing down, and there are restaurants taking measures like tacking a 15 percent surcharge on customer checks to try to keep from firing people.

More proof that there is no such thing as utopian socialism…for, in reality, utopia can exist only by virtue of the privilege provided by its evil nemesis: capitalism.