George Will's embarassing and ignorance-laden salvo against the minimum wage on the opening day of 110th Congress was a beautiful example of just how decrepit the faux intelligensia of the Right has become.
Will attempted to argue that the minimum wage should be eliminated because:
Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices.
Labor is a commodity?
Really, George? Where the heck did you get that one? Certainly not from your freshman econ course because as it turns out, in the United States labor is manifestly not a commodity according to federal antitrust law since 1914.
The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.
(US Code Title 15, Ch. 1 § 17) [1]
The fact that this profound statement wound up being codified by Act of Congress should be considered as one of the great legacies of the Progressive Era. It has been enshrined in the core of American social values for nearly a century. The philosophical justification for the existence of organized labor in a society that otherwise discourages trusts arguably rests on this statement.
So what are you trying to pull here, George? How could you twist such an important point of economic history so much? Is this a case of a naive confusion with a separate concept from classical economic theory, the labor theory of value? Is it some kind of neocon Ayn Rand kool-aid acid test?
Labor a commodity? Uh, no. Petroleum is a commodity. So is platinum. So are pork bellies. So is frozen concentrated orange juice.
Pork bellies pile up in warehouses when the demand is too great. Sometimes they rot. Petroleum sits undrilled and unrefined. Car parts sit in warehouses.
And human beings? Well they can be warehoused too, can't they, when the demand is too low?
Thankfully this question was settled back in the early Twentieth Century, when the modern antitrust laws were adopted in such a way as to permit the existence of unions. These laws were among the greatest expressions of American legal genius of their day.
The minimum wage is in essence the "Union of Last Resort" for the working poor, collective bargaining by Act of Congress. Its elimination can arguably been seen as the logical extension of the campaign against organized labor over the last fifty years. How ironic that one of the greatest union busters of all time was just given a state funeral.
Perhaps Will simply doesn't know how what he is talking about. Who can argue with a man with a bow tie?
Or he is trying to deny away the Progressive Era in some Bushian postmodern dramaturgical voodoo?
What's next, George? Why not push for retroactive signing statements, in which the President can reinterpret Acts of previous Congresses with the same flexibility that Bush now applies to Acts of the present Congress?
How about trying convince us that the plumbing code was a myth?