Kevin D. Williamson of National Review uses his latest column to fight back against the latest outbreak of minimum-wage madness.
Those against raising the minimum wage will cite Economics 101: Raise the price of something and demand will go down. Those in favor of raising the minimum wage will harrumph in the face of economics and declare that their opponents, and economics, hate poor people.
The purpose of this fight is not to hash out economic questions related to low-income people. The purpose of the fight is the fight: There is no minimum wage high enough to keep the Democrats from introducing an increase next year, because the point of bills hiking the minimum wage is to force Republicans to vote against them, which provides Democrats with a moment of cherished political theater. They do not give a fig about poor people — as everybody knows, the real minimum wage is $0.00, and more Americans today are making that than at any time in recent memory, which is what is meant by “record low workforce-participation rates.”
But let’s pretend like those pushing the new increase are not a gaggle of cynical charlatans building their political power on the backs of the poor and the unemployed and examine their arguments.
Why would you want to raise the minimum wage? A few possibilities:
1. Minimum-wage workers are worth more than we pay them. That is a meaningless statement; labor, like apples and oranges and widgets, is worth what you can sell it for. If you believe that we have a large supply of low-wage workers who are secretly more skilled and productive than they let on, you have to assume that everybody in the question — the workers, their employers, their employers’ competitors — has somehow overlooked that fact, but that our ingenious friends in Washington have special insight into the conditions of people they have never met and markets they have never operated in. That’s fanciful.
