Living Wage-Earlier Thoughts

For anyone who doubts the difficulty (or impossibility) of living on minimum wage, see Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. But the question of whether we should raise the minimum wage by law is a complex one, and implicates the mandate primum non nocere. Steve Bainbridge and I had an interesting exchange on proposed living wage legislation in Santa Monica CA a couple of years ago, particularly with respect to the concept's status in Catholic social teaching. I recall that we agreed that the central question is whether minimum wage legislation does more harm than good, by actually making lower paying jobs scarcer, or turning them into black market jobs. This strikes me as essentially an empirical question. There is also a question about the desirability of municipal or other locality-based higher minimum legislation: does that not give some (many?) employers too easy an an incentive to shift locale? Wouldn't it be preferable to enact such legislation on a national or at least statewide basis to prevent that? Unfortunately,I don't have links to our much fuller discussion of all this. Perhaps Steve has them -- there were also some interesting comments by his readers.

--Mark