You listen to debates these days about why we should or shouldn’t raise the federal minimum wage and you might get the idea that this argument is about the economic benefits or drawbacks of doing so. That’s not actually the case on the Republicans’ side of the argument.
Yes, Republicans describe the negative economic consequences they claim might come about if the federal minimum wage is hiked. They point to small employers who won’t hire new help and perhaps have to lay off existing workers. They cite possible loss of marketplace entry-level opportunities for young people.
They have other economic pitches as well, but none really encapsulates the thinking of the New Republicans who now run the Grand Old Party. The reason these New Republicans oppose any increase in the federal minimum wage is really more mythic than economic.
Think of the last presidential campaign and the descriptions of employers by Republicans before and since. These are the job creators. These people allow the economy to grow. These are the people who make, not take. This is The Great Employer Mystique.
You get into this mystical way of thinking and employers emerge as a kind of exalted class. Their employees don’t help operate their businesses. Employees don’t play much of a part — or any meaningful part — in generating wealth. The worthwhile generating in this paradigm all comes from the top, from the employer, and what is doled out in the form of wages, and God forbid, additional benefits, become a kind of sinful diminishment of deserved retention imposed by an alien party, the state, or merely a kind of employer gift, an act of charity.
Think of just providing the opportunity for others to work as the ultimate wage, and you have the basis of New Republican thinking in the economic realm. And you immediately see why this political group opposes any increase in the federal minimum wage. And why purely economic arguments (as opposed to mythical ones) used to justify this point of view are merely decoration.
And why so much of present-day governance in these United States is so Kafka-esque.
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