Included in the March 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act were three programs with less euphonious acronyms: FPUC, PEUC, and PUA. These programs extended (by 13 weeks), expanded (to self-employed workers), and added a $600 per week federal kicker to, state-level unemployment benefits. As July comes to a close, more than 25 million Americans are about to lose that federal kicker.

The usual setup for the usual partisan fight over whether generous government benefits help the congenitally hard-working American people through tough times (the Democratic line) or discourage the congenitally lazy American people from getting off the couch and going to work (the Republican line)?

Well, yeah, but that this one’s shaping up a little differently than usual. Most American workers have presumably noticed the math involved here.  I doubt many of them consider that math mere coincidence: Assuming a 40-hour work week, $600 breaks down to $15 an hour.

For several years now, ongoing campaigns have tried to sell Americans on $15 an hour as the bottom end of “living wage” territory, and as a proper minimum hourly wage to be required by law. In fact, some cities and states have already adopted $15 per hour minimum wage laws, and some large employers have committed to that number whether it’s the law or not.

Election-year politics being what they are, I expect a compromise as the House, Senate, and White House negotiate a second edition of the CARES Act:

The Democratic House will grudgingly accept an end —  not immediate, but after an extension of no more than another three months — to the $600 unemployment kicker, in return for a $15 per hour federal minimum wage.

The Republican Senate will grudgingly accept a $15 per hour federal minimum wage, in return for phasing out the unemployment kicker.

US president Donald Trump will fist-pump and claim that he’s putting America back to work. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will strut and claim that his party’s giving America a raise.

I’m against minimum wage laws for several reasons. Here are two: As a libertarian, I want government out of labor markets on principle; and as a supporter of unions, I want workers organizing for good wages and benefits instead of settling for the cheap substitutes Big Business lets its government servants hand out.

But my opposition to minimum wages doesn’t depend on a particular level. I’m no MORE against $15 an hour than I am against the current $7.25 an hour, or against the $3.35 an hour that prevailed when I entered the work force.

While it’s true that minimum wage hikes hurt some of America’s poorest and least skilled workers and don’t really help anyone in the long term, there’s an up side to them as well:

As the effects of each minimum wage hike propagate through the economy and it turns out to have been a wash at best, a few more workers will stop falling for government’s economic planning baloney and unionize themselves instead. Which any good libertarian loves and supports as a fine example of the market at work.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

George Washington, America’s first president, devoted part of his 1796 farewell address to warning against “[t]he alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension.” He feared perpetual war for power between political parties both as “a frightful despotism” in and of itself, and as prelude to some future tyrant seeking “his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”

Was Washington right? Sort of. Political parties possess all the evil characteristics he attributed to them. What he seems to have missed is their inevitability.  By the time he exited the presidential stage, Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were already struggling for power, a struggle which continues to this day under other party names.

Any system that apportions power through political means is going to sprout factions. If those factions contest power through elections, they’re going to become parties.

Are there “non-partisan” elections? In theory, yes. In practice, not really.

For example, look at Nebraska’s state legislature, the Unicameral. Elections to it are theoretically non-partisan, but political parties back the candidates and 48 of its 49 members have known party affiliations.

In 2016, Nebraska Senator Laura Ebke changed her affiliation from Republican to Libertarian. In 2018, the Republican Party backed a Republican who unseated her. So much for “non-partisan.”

Ditto city governments around the country. Even where they’re formally “non-partisan,” most officials are party-affiliated and party-backed. Many politicians treat local office as the first rung of a climb up the party, and political, ladders.

Like it or not, if we’re going to keep a democratic process, we’re going to have political parties. Sorry, George. Fortunately, there are up sides.

At the individual candidate level, partisan affiliation conveys information. A Republican candidate is more like Mitch McConnell than like Nancy Pelosi; a Democratic candidate, vice versa; a Libertarian or Green candidate is something different.

That information is imperfect. Not every candidate will agree with everything in his or her party’s platform, or toe every party line in office. But it’s better than nothing.

At the macro level, partisan affiliation tells us whether we have a healthy democracy or are moving toward a one-party state, with one party becoming increasingly dominant or two dominant parties looking more and more like each other.

That last situation sums up recent decades pretty well. There’s a reason why both “major” parties are nominating creepy, handsy, probably senile, and undoubtedly corrupt septuagenarians for president this year: They’re fresh out of competing ideas. In “Hollywood for ugly people,” this is what a beauty contest looks like. Thankfully there’s no swimsuit competition.

So party on, I guess, but if you waste your vote on Republicans and Democrats, don’t complain when you get Trumps and Bidens.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Full-time minimum wage workers cannot afford a two-bedroom rental anywhere in the U.S.,” Alicia Adamczyk writes at CNBC, “and cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95% of U.S. counties.” Adamczyk gets her figures from the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report.

Here are a few numbers NLIHC isn’t as eager to talk about:

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, a whopping  1.9% of all American workers, and only 1% of full-time workers, earned minimum wage as of 2019. Also per BLS, minimum wage workers are more likely than average to be employed in food service jobs where wages are often supplemented with tips.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, 60% of workers in the lowest income decile (which would include minimum wage earners) receive public assistance benefits that top off a full-time minimum wage earner’s wages by an average of about $1.50 an hour.

And then we come to two assumptions in the NLIHC report that become problematic, especially when combined.

The first assumption is that rent is only “affordable” if it comes to less than 30% of a person’s income. But that seems awfully one-size-fits-all. What if spending 35% of my income on rent saves me 10% of that income somewhere else — utility bills or gas costs for longer commutes, for example?

The second assumption is that that there’s only one earner living in (or at least only one earner contributing to the rent on) the household. That assumption seems especially silly as applied to two-bedroom rentals. In reality, many people share housing. They move in with their romantic partners, or find amicable roomies. Just as many hands make light work, many paychecks make lower per-person rent.

Is the rent, as Jimmy McMillan says, too damn high? In some places, absolutely. In many places, probably.

Is the rent being too damn high a function of the minimum wage being too damn low? No. A tiny fraction of one percent of Americans struggling to make rent are full-time minimum wage workers without secondary sources of income.

The rent is too damn high because the housing supply is too damn limited.

Who are the geniuses limiting the housing supply with permit schemes, zoning restrictions, and supposed “fair housing” rules, all while pretending they’re doing tenants a favor?

The same geniuses who oppress workers with minimum wage laws, licensing requirements, and supposed “labor protections,” all while pretending they’re doing workers a favor.

Making it harder for the average worker to earn a living and find  a place to live may not be the intended purpose of government as we know it, but it’s certainly the result of government as we know it.

Perhaps it’s time for America’s workers to re-think government as we know it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY