Minimum employment.

Minimum Employment

THE MINIMUM WAGE is back. For some years, it had been rendered relatively innocuous by mild but cumulative inflation, so that McDonald's now typically pays much more than the minimum even for starting employees.

Nobody really believes the government can simply force some people to pay more money to others. The motives behind new congressional efforts to hike the minimum wage are more serious than that. Some employers in industries that necessarily pay low wages (because they sell cheap products, like assembly-line hamburgers) are worried about competition from new rivals that might be willing to be less picky, taking risks by training marginal entry-level employees at an even lower wage. Trade unions are also worried, as always, about competition from workers who are on the outside looking in.

Those who stand to lose the most from the political influence of such anti-competitive firms and unions include young people, women who have been out of the labor force, new immigrants who are just learning English, people who seem too fat or too short, retirees seeking part-time work, and other who can't get around notorious medieval-guild restrictions on union and professional jobs. Potential competition from people who are eager to do possibly inferior work for less pay constitutes a particularly serious threat to those with government-supported monopoly privileges, such as occupational licensing or government-regulated cartels. Much better, from this point of view, to keep the kids on the street.

Defenders of a higher minimum wage rightly point out that it is impossible to support a family on the minimum wage. But that is irrelevant--very few minimum-wage workers are family heads; most of them are teenagers and other secondary workers. In any case, having no job at a higher wage is not obviously better than having a job at a lower wage. If better opportunities existed, those now working at the minimum wage would presumably have taken them. To deny low-wage job experience is to cut off the first rung on the ladder of opportunity.

Advocates of a higher minimum wage betray their insincerity by not proposing a minimum wage of $10 an hour, or $100, or $1,000. They know perfectly well that their proposal will make it most difficult for the least prepared job applicants to gain valuable work experience. That is not an accidental side effect, but the law's only real purpose. The minimum wage is obviously designed to protect holders of established privileges against disadvantaged newcomers.