Lux Lucet

These days, all is not well at the home of the Happy Meal. Against the walkout rumblings among the ranks of fast food workers, President Obama played the populist, announcing his intent to raise the minimum wage from its current $7.25 to $10.10. To my knowledge, Obama’s push for a higher minimum wage hasn’t yet been given a cleaver name. So let me suggest a few. How about the Unaffordable Wage Act of 2013? Or perhaps the Mandatory Unemployment Initiative. The Effective Elimination of Entry Level Employment Effort sports a nice alliterative ring, does it not?

I’m a bit hesitant to opine against hikes in the minimum wage. For in some ways, it’s the more boring things an arm chair economist could do. I mean, who’s going to argue that minimum wage laws don’t result in higher unemployment? I doubt even a good Keynesian like Paul Krugman would take that stand. But while it is widely known that minimum wage laws result in unemployment, what is less well known is origin of such laws. And this makes writing on the subject worthwhile. For while most people are aware of such laws, few realize that this concept was introduced to the US largely through the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church-State.

Writing about this issue in his book Ecclesiastical Megalomania, John Robbins made the following point.

“The Roman Catholic priest John A. Ryan (1869-1945), who has been called “the foremost academician of the American Catholic social movement” and derogatorily nicknamed the “Right Reverend New Dealer,” published his first book in 1906, A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects. It was a sustained argument for a legally mandated minimum wage [yes, there really was a time in American history when such laws did not exist], which we have had nationally since the 1930s. Richard Ely, the founder of the American Economic Association and a member of the Social Gospel movement, praised the book as ‘the first attempt in the English language to elaborate on what may be called a Roman Catholic system of political economy’ ” (pp.83, 84).

So there you have it, minimum wage laws are part of the “Roman Catholic system of political economy.” Unfortunately for supporters of this system, the Bible offers them scant solace.

Jesus himself pronounced against minimum wage laws – and all other forms of socialism for that matter – in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. For the full text, please see Matthew 20:1-16. In summary, the parable is as follows. Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a landowner who hires workers for his vineyard. Some he hired early in the day, some part way through, and others near quitting time. To each group he offered the same wage, a denarius per day. At the end of the workday, the workers who were hired early expected to get more, but received the denarius they originally agreed to, the same wage as those who were hired later. When they began to complain about this, then the landowner rebuked one of them – maybe he was planning on setting up a picket line – by saying,

“Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go your way. I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things?” (Matt.20:13-15)

In this one statement, Jesus overthrows the whole of Romanist economics. For Roman Catholic political economy denies what Jesus affirms, it is lawful – note well, landowner does not assert his rights, he defends his position by appealing to the law of God, the language of rights, so common in our political discourse, is foreign to Scripture – for one to do what he wishes with his own things. This explicitly includes the decision how much to pay an employee, and implicitly the lawfulness of private property and free enterprise in general.