We Should Agree About This

Dan Fruth's very sane approach to increasing wages for working Americans.

I’m very pleased to publish Dan Fruth’s very thoughtful piece on wage increases. A former student, Dan is a lawyer in the Columbus area.

Modern political debates have become a blur of liberals complaining about low tax rates for billionaires who take pleasure trips to space and conservatives complaining about closed restaurants, unfilled jobs, and the working poor refusing to leave the couch.

Liberals wax poetically about the evils of "income inequality" and conservatives push back from the table as they rant, on their way out of the door, about how "socialism" is eviscerating the work ethic that built America. In the process, we are failing to speak plainly about what we really mean and what we really value.

What most liberals really want is to eliminate poverty and strengthen the middle class. They see poverty not as a noble motivator but a foot on the throat, starving a large class of people of the oxygen they need to thrive. Conservatives do not want to hurt the poor, but they do not want to punish those who have wealth. Why fight to eliminate poverty if you’re just going to punish the folks who worked their way up the economic ladder?

It’s a simple question of what we value. Conservatives admire “success” more than they dislike poverty. Liberals dislike poverty more than they admire wealth. Each side acts as if its preferred value system cannot be sustained in the presence of the other’s. This is a fallacy that the pandemic has brought into full relief. The poor learned from Covid that minimum wage was worthless to them. By the time a person earning minimum wage pays for gas, insurance, car maintenance, child care, etc. there’s nothing left at the end of the day. A person earning minimum wage is working hard to support a family that they have no time to see. You can add a second minimum wage job, maybe even a third, but the net result is the same. Because of the unique pressures of the pandemic economy, the working poor had a bit of time to take a sabbatical, paid for by the government.

These folks came back realizing that their time and skills are worth more than they had previously received. They need a greater hourly wage to make the economics of living in America work for them. This is not the mark of a lazy person. Rather, this is the rational behavior of a people who had the foot removed from their collective throat long enough to understand that they had been laboring under a bad deal.

We're seeing the working poor refuse to reenter this bad deal - so wages are rising on the low end of the economy. We see some inflation, but we're accomplishing the goal of strengthening the lower and middle class.

The wealthy are not hurt by this. When has a robust working class ever produced a net negative result for the wealthy in America? Conservatives should recognize and applaud the free-market system re-balancing itself, even if it pains them that unemployment benefits during the pandemic kicked off the process. In the end, we’re seeing a highly functional example of liberal and conservative ideals at work in society - but not in a way that anybody specifically set out to engineer.