The local newspaper in my small town manages to publish six days each week, which if I remember right was its frequency fifty-plus years ago, before I moved from the area. That's not bad, given the difficulties newspapers everywhere are having. Of course the pages are smaller than they used to be, as with most newspapers nowadays, but most of the content is locally produced and relevant. I subscribe to the digital edition to support a local business, though I still seem to end up reading a print copy at the public library most of the time.
Last week I noticed a big column printed on a gray background, running from the top to the bottom of the editorial page. It turned out to be a syndicated thing by Michael J. Hicks, a professor of economics at Ball State University, on the subject of the minimum wage, a timely enough topic. I started reading. It was strange.
The minimum wage has been much in the news these days, because of Joe Biden's abandoned promise to raise it to $15. Professor Hicks began by declaring, "it seems wise to treat the issue a bit differently."
Instead of outlining the positive and negative effects of a particular increase of the minimum wage, I’ll offer the best arguments for and against any minimum wage. In so doing I’ll attempt an ideological Turing test, making the arguments so clearly that a reader cannot discern my personal position. By explaining the best arguments on both sides, I hope to achieve two goals. The first is to make clear the need for compromise. The second is to maximize angry comments from readers. Wish me luck.
And that was what he did: he rehearsed some basic arguments for and against having a minimum wage at all. It reminded me of the late Alexander Cockburn's satirical piece "The Tedium Twins," which mocked PBS's McNeil-Lehrer Report for its dedication to finding two sides to every question, both of them as near a fantasized middle of the road as possible. It's true that there are people who'd like to abolish the minimum wage, but they aren't likely to get anywhere, and abolition is not on the table right now anyway. So why bother? It's like going over the arguments for and against giving women the vote: quite irrelevant except for a few cranks, but it does fill up those column-inches, and Professor Hicks expressed his hope that he'd covered the arguments well.
If I have done so, and you, dear reader, are honest with yourself, you must admit that both the argument for and against hold a great deal of truth. I would go so far as to say that both arguments are essentially true.
The policy environment facing functioning democracies is almost always like the minimum wage debate. Both sides offer argument possessed of both supportive facts and truth. Yet, entirely reasonable, educated and well-meaning people still disagree. It is a hallmark of a liberal democracy that our policy debates are dominated by matters in which compromise is not just possible, but necessary. That is largely because we’ve solved most of those problems where compromise is not possible.
Well ... no. If I'm honest with myself, the arguments against the minimum wage were actually quite bad.
The best argument in opposition to a minimum wage is that government should not, and cannot, be in the wage- or price-setting business. Government has no role in a great many high-stakes personal decisions. Government cannot tell us what language to speak, what church to attend, who to marry or with whom to form a family.
No government may tell us adults how much alcohol we may consume, whether or not we can smoke tobacco, nor increasingly whether or not we may freely purchase cannabis or other drugs. Government cannot tell us whether or not we may own a gun or what type of house, automobile or boat we may own. Government isn’t permitted to do these things because free people won’t allow government to do these things.
However, free people will allow government to set and increase a minimum wage: a $15 minimum wage is favored by about two-thirds of likely voters, according to Pew, and other pollsters get similar results. The comparisons Hicks lists -- what language to speak, which church to attend, who to marry, etc. -- are not similar in kind to a mandated minimum wage anyway. I don't think it's accurate to claim that this argument is essentially true. Hicks says it's the best one he knows of, and despite his affectation of impartiality, he can hardly take it seriously. Instead he spent quite a number of column-inches saying effectively nothing. I would call that irresponsible: as an educator, his role should be to address live issues rather than evade them.
As for "compromise," well...
As Congress commences a debate on increasing the minimum wage, we should view this as a crucial moment for our Republic. We have just passed through the most significant assault on our Constitution since the Civil War. Our ability to overcome that and prevent it in the future depends in part on how effectively we compromise over legislation. We should view the minimum wage as a good place to start.
The fun part of this sort of rhetoric is that you can advocate pretty much any kind of compromise you like if you get to decide where the extremes are. Professor Hicks sets his extremes as abolition of the minimum wage and having one; compromise in that case would mean cutting the minimum wage, and I don't think a free people will allow that to happen. The important point here is that those are not the options Congress will debate. On Professor Hicks's assumptions, compromise would mean raising it to less than $15, or maybe cutting it, depending on where he imagines the Republican position to be. That is not going to work either. I'd like to suppose that as a professor of economics, he's aware that the current figure, $7.25, is a poverty wage that hasn't kept up with either inflation or increased worker productivity, which wage increases are supposed in principle to track.
But to repeat, compromise depends on where you set the extremes, so let me suggest as one extreme that the minimum wage be abolished, and on the other, that the US impose really confiscatory taxes on the richest Americans, and use the new income to institute a guaranteed universal income for all Americans. While I'm dreaming, let me add the abolition of all business-endowed chairs of economics at state universities. We could compromise on, say, a $50 minimum wage. Our future depends on how effectively we compromise on legislation, so let's get to it.
