The conservative economist Walter Williams said, correctly, that the introduction of the minimum wage under FDR in 1938 had the effect of kicking a lot of black workers out of their jobs. He did not say why, he just said: Therefore, minimum wage is a bad idea.

The reason so many African-Americans lost their jobs, especially in the South, was that there was a two-tiered wage system for many jobs, with blacks typically getting paid half what whites were. Since everyone now had to be paid the same, white employers fired their black workers and hired whites in their places. Williams neglected to point out that the actual reason for the blacks losing their jobs was racism, not the minimum wage.

RD is reminding us of the truth of John Kenneth Galbraith's "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness". RD doesn't want to pay more for a Big Mac.