The minimum wage, federal or state, did not come down from the mountain with Moses. It is not engraved on tablets of stone. It is merely printed on the blue and white paper of depressed little paychecks all over America.

It's the kind of paycheck you cash in a bar or in one of those check-cashing storefronts specifically designed make money off people you would swear had no more to give.

That's where your thinking goes wrong. As an old and unlovely bookie once told me, "Nobody's so poor that somebody can't get rich screwing 'em."

But that doesn't have anything to do with you. You're making $14 an hour and you hate, in order, people on welfare, people poorer than you are, illegal immigrants and people who are "politically correct."

You do not hate, in order, people making $14 million a year, people who are taking their companies offshore to weasel out of taxes, the unseen overlords who own the company you work for and members of the United States military, wherever they may be dying.

Trouble is, the people at the top can't tell the difference between you and the minimum wage worker, the welfare mother and the illegal immigrant, except that the illegal immigrant will often work for below minimum wage and is therefore a better employee than you can ever hope to be.

Yup. You picked the wrong enemies. You're mad at people who have never hurt you, don't want to hurt you and can't hurt you.

The poor don't ship your kids off to die in East Carbombistan. The poor don't close factories, lay people off, break your union, do away with your pension, force you to work overtime and jack up the co-pay on your medical insurance.

Some of the poor, it's true, will break into your house and quite possibly shoot you, but, hey, you have a gun so the field is pretty level in the case of home invasion.

That's why, in general, really rich people are in favor of you owning a gun, because they know damn well you're not going to use it on them, principally because you're never in their neighborhood, which is gated so that $14-an-hour slobs like you can't get in and start shooting rich people.

Those $8-an-hour clowns out on the street, clamoring for a raise on their fast-food jobs? They're nothing like you. You make $14 an hour, which is $6 more than $8. That's, like, nearly double what they make.

Thing is, ya gotta be better than somebody, dontcha? Well, dontcha? If you're not, if you have to face the fact that you're closer to being a welfare mother than you are to being a billionaire, it's going to be very hard to keep working for $14 an hour, no matter how many times he employee handbook tells you you're a "team member."

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Marc Dion's book of Pulitzer Prize-nominated columns "Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America," is available for Kindle and Nook.