Don't Call It Socialism

LATE JUNE IS, or should be, national fair labor standards month, in honor of the passage, in 1938, of the first minimum wage law. And ever since it was passed, conservatives have been complaining about it, all manner of complaint imaginable.

Its too intrusive into the economy. Too much government power. Let the free market determine wages and salaries. Let the businessman and the working man be free. It isn't high enough. It isn't low enough.

Recently the argument has been that the minimum wage was lower than the free market wage, and so was dragging down the free market wage for low wage people. Well, if that is the case, so be it. Mimimum wage can always be raiwed to keep pace with the supposed "market."

The term "free market" with regard to the value of work must be qualified, because in america, the corporate oligarchy conspires to keep the cost of labor low, low, low, far below what it would be worth in an actual free market.

The mimimum wage itself has always been a joke, because it has always been ridiculously low, as it is now. In the end, everybody got their wish; the legislators who passed the Fair Labor Standards Act got political credit for truly caring about america's working poor, while the wealthy corporate elite who own the politicians got a token law which did nothing to end opportunities for corporate exploitation of workers.

Before the mimimum wager laws, before labor laws in general, conditions for the working class in america were deplorable, and always had been. The free market, in over two hundred years of a grand new experiment in political and economic "freedom" had not yet produced a balanced and reasonable labor situation.

So perhaps free market laissez faire economics does not inherently, ultimately lead to justice. Perhaps, among human beings, in order for there to be justice of any sort, it must be imposed upon us all by cooperative agreement with the power of law.

By having mimimum wage at least we make it a bit more awkward to pay people five dollars an hour for hard labor, and perhaps stirkes a glancing blow against slavery, which still, unbelievably, exists all over the world.  Just don't call it "socialism", and maybe the powers that be will ingore it, and, if nothing else, leave it alone.