George Leef’s latest Forbes column examines a key flaw in President Obama’s latest State of the Union address.
President Obama’s penultimate SOTU was notable for its audacity in demanding an even more expansive role for the federal government. Although trust in government has plummeted during his relentlessly statist administration, the president wants Americans to rally behind his belief that more federal mandates and spending will “turn the page” and make the country great.
I would like to single out one especially wrong-headed idea – that Congress should amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, requiring employers to pay many workers more.
Obama supports increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. In his speech, he argued for it this way: “And to everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.” …
… [W]hat I want to focus on is the way Obama made his pitch: It’s hard to support a family on less than $15,000 per year, therefore politicians should give them a raise.
Those four words illuminate the appeal of minimum wage laws to “progressives.” They build support in the minds of voters for their true goal – getting them to think of the government as a source of free benefits.
In the days before the minimum wage, everyone understood that if you wanted a better standard of living, getting it was up to you.
If you worked for yourself (in agriculture, perhaps), improving your lot in life depended on finding more efficient ways of producing. If you worked for someone else, you could raise your skill level to make yourself more valuable, then bargain for a wage increase, or else take your labor elsewhere.
Americans knew that if they wanted more, earning it was their responsibility. Most accomplished that through industry and ingenuity.
The cancerous effect of minimum wage laws is to cause people to look instead to politics as a way of fulfilling their desires. Want a raise? Vote for the right politicians and they’ll give it to you.
With government in the “free stuff” business, campaigns start revolving around who can promise the most to the various groups clamoring for benefits. Rather than working and cooperating with others to solve their problems, people increasingly waste their energy on political wrangling.