Until today I thought I was the only person thinking it odd that President Obama wants to be identified with Abraham Lincoln. In his latest column Walter Williams makes it clear that he also thinks it was a mistake, or at least not well advised. I highly recommend that you read his column.

During his campaign Obama talked a lot about his desire to unify the country and frequently decried divisiveness. (I've always wondered why those who place a premium on unity don't just switch to the opposing view, and thereby boost unity.) If he values unity that much why does he identify with the former president who did more than any other to ensure that the country would long (forever?) remain divided? No, I'm not off my rocker. Lincoln did manage -- after hundreds of thousands of lives were lost -- to keep the country together physically. But by forcing the South to remain in the Union he guaranteed continued political strife, dissension and division for decades, if not centuries.

I'm talking about ideological and cultural disunity and so was Obama on the campaign trail. What Lincoln did was prevent a failed marriage from dissolving. He forced the couple to live in the same house and raise their children together when all concerned might have been better served if the marriage had been dissolved.

I can't say for certain that Obama holds this view but many on the political left believe that America is the big bully on the world playground. If Lincoln had let the country divide it is not highly likely that either the Union or the Confederacy would be that powerful today.

Williams points out that Lincoln was no friend of the slaves. He did only what he thought politically expedient. Slavery was not an issue in the Civil War until about the third year when Lincoln made it so. He needed a rallying cry because the North was losing the war at that time. The Union passed up many opportunities to abolish slavery long before the war started.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not necessarily saying that we would all be better off today if Lincoln had just let the Confederate States go. I'm just trying to point out why I think it strange that our first black president wants to identify so strongly with Lincoln.

After reading a Walter Williams column on the effect of the minimum wage law on American Samoa, I started thinking about my experience as a cotton picker when I was about 14 years old (I mean manually picking cotton; I was never a machine.). At that time there was no minimum wage law that applied to farm labor and, apparently, no child labor laws. Farmers paid based on level of production rather than by the hour for most farm labor.

The farmer I picked for was paying three cents per pound of cotton picked. I managed to pick about 100 pounds per day so I earned about three dollars per day. Another boy the same age as me could pick about 200 pounds per day so he earned twice as much as I did. It never occurred to me that this was unfair. He was bigger and stronger than me and could put more cotton in his sack before having to carry it to the truck to be weighed and emptied. He also took shorter rest breaks.

What do you suppose would have happened if a minimum wage law required the farmer to pay each of his pickers six dollars per day regardless of their production? I would not have been hired and I wouldn't have made enough money that summer to buy a bicycle and clothes for school. And the other boy might not have picked 200 pounds per day. It would raise other issues like the length of a day and the length of work-breaks during the day.

What if the farmer was a socialist and announced that he was going to add up all of each day's production, divide it by the number of pickers and pay each picker for that amount? That is, pay each picker the same regardless of their individual production. First, the 200-pound-per-day boy and the other top producers would go find another farmer to pick for. Second, animosity would grow amongst the remaining pickers over the level of each picker's production and overall production would decline dramatically. Third, the socialist farmer would be forced out of business because of his inability to get his crop to market.