Writing on the website of The Foundation for Economic Education (now there is a truly Sisyphean task), Professor Gary Galles examines the apparently odd fact that Wal-Mart has come out in favor of a higher minimum wage. Read it here.

Wal-Mart doesn’t want the interference of labor unions in its management, but sees nothing wrong with the feds interfering in the pricing of labor, which will have little or no impact on it, but could be detrimental to some smaller competitors. Same old nasty game of trying to use government for your own benefit.

Galles makes all of the good, usual arguments against raising (or even having) the minimum wage except this. When government dictates minimum or maximum prices for anything, it intrudes on what ought to be a completely private matter. The government has no more business deciding what the minimum wage will be than it has in coming around to people’s yard sales and deciding that their posted prices are too high or too low. Whether people want to transact and what values they come to assign to the goods or services exchanged should never be a matter for coercive interference by third parties.