On Strawmen and Living Wages

We had a tiny little debate on minimum wage over at Craig’s mtpolitics.net. It didn’t amount to much, but I ran across the following argument, posted by David, who runs a blog called Better Living Through Blogging :

My answer to the minimum-wage idjits: if increasing the minimum-wage to $6.15 per hour is good, then surely increasing it to $25 per hour is better. And by that logic, increasing it to, say, $100 per hour would be GREAT!

Right?

Oh, but that’s not what you meant? That’s not reasonable?

Well then what makes your figure of $6.15 per hour (or any other mandated wage) reasonable?

It’s an easy argument to answer – living costs exceed wages provided by a $5.15 per hour wage. Low-wage workers are disadvantaged in many ways, one of which is that there are, in many markets, a surplus of them. When that happens, downward pressure is exerted on wages, and people wind up working not for $5.15 per hour, but $4.00 per hour, $3.00, $2.00 – David likes to run his argument out to extremes, so let’s take an extreme case – $1.50 per day, as in places like Vietnam, where they make Nike sneakers.

In other words, there’s no correlation between living costs and wages paid low-skilled workers. The wage they can earn in a surplus labor market is too low to live on. That class of people experiences daily something that most of us are immune to – the free market. It’s not a pretty thing.

So, given the ugliness of market outcomes, we as a society elect to step in and set an arbitrary standard – there shall be no wage less than $6.15 per hour in the state of Montana. We didn’t say $25 or $100 per hour because a minimum wage that high would be absurd. That’s a strawman argument. We said $6.15 because we can easily absorb such a low minimum. In fact, we could do better. The people who worked so hard to get the wage passed surely knew that even $6.15 was not high enough, but politics is the art of the doable.

Question now for David, who put forth the argument above. The standard conservative response to a higher minimum wage – to any minimum at all, is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch – that whatever we gain in wages we lose in the number of people employed. Minimum wage has been raised in many states over the years while the Federal Government has dallied. Please, if you would, David, give an example of a state where minimum wage increased and employment in the low-wage sector decreased.

Clock’s running. Tick tock tick tock …..

There’s talk now of a higher mandated minimum of over $7.00 per hour coming out of Washington in the wake of the election landslide. It’s a good wedge issue, and if Bush were to veto it, his approval ratings would plummet. (Just kidding.) But Democrats have an opportunity here to do something that will truly help their supposed base. Let’s hope they have it in them.