In more superstitious days, humans found themselves living in a world of spiritual fear. Projected above the material was a misty, platonic world of shadowy concepts and angry personalities.Demons were behind dysentery, sacrificial virgins appeased the angry volcano god and self-flagellation prevented the Black Death.There are two problems with a false answer. The legends of the past failed to prevent the diseases and disasters of the day, and they killed the curiosity normally driving knowledge.It was not until enlightenment thinkers questioned these superstitions that the horror of the Dark Ages was mitigated. To speak with honesty and clarity, we must forget the man-made and exclusively focus on what actually exists.When scientists laid the destructive myths to rest, the result was a scientific revolution that tripled the expected lifespan and gave us modern marvels such as the printing press, the cell phone and the Mochassippi.The world is desperately in need of a similar revolution in political and moral reasoning. Subjective concepts have no effects on the objective world.It might be useful to speak of a “forest,” but one cannot clear-cut a “forest” without cutting down individual trees.You may claim to love your family, but this is just an easy way to say you love the individuals in your family.Young entrepreneurs cannot sell the concept of lemonade, and young consumers cannot pay with the concept of money.Disagree? I have the concept of a bridge to sell you.To put it conceptually, the destructive demons haunting our political discussions hide in the mists of concepts.As the Oxford English Dictionary put it, “call a spade a bloody shovel.”Preferring “citizens” of one country over another — whether in trade, immigration or movement — is to say infants chucked at one side of an arbitrary line in the sand deserve special treatment.It’s convenient to use the word “government,” but it is more accurate to say “a bunch of people with guns.”When people say the government should enforce a minimum wage, they’re calling for a bunch of people with guns to threaten violence against those hired for less than an arbitrary amount of money. Tough luck for the untrained and inexperienced who can’t supply enough value.One wonders what motivations are concealed in the midst of abstract conceptions.For proponents of minimum wage requirements and other government interventions, it was often racism.Because money “knows no color but green,” many white supremacists demanded the government keep white employers from following the natural incentive of capitalism to hire the cheapest competent worker.In 1938, the first federally mandated minimum wage law led to 500,000 blacks losing their jobs, according to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.To be fair, statistical evidence suggests modern American minimum wage requirements aren’t high enough to cause much unemployment, and modern supporters of such interventions are probably motivated by misplaced compassion. But because the violence inherent in minimum wage laws are hidden by concepts, proponents could again create a barrier to prosperity for those they allegedly hope to help.In my last column, I gave reasons why allowing child labor in developing countries would increase prosperity. A subsequent letter to the editor used “real-life logic” to make the contradictory claim that child labor would be cheaper but would not increase production. Even if this is the case, he believes men with guns should prevent starving children from being able to work.Without concepts, few would dare advance such a barbaric view.Strip your discussions of concepts, or I’ll throw the evil eye at you.Daniel Morgan is a 21-year-old economics junior from Baton Rouge.—-Contact Daniel Morgan at [email protected]