I borrowed that headline from the Huffington Post:

The Freedom Socialist Party has right-wing bloggers seeing red over a job listing that paid less than the group advocates for a minimum wage.
Earlier this month, the nonprofit posted listings on Craigslist and Indeed to advertise an opening for a part-time web designer. It offered to pay $13 an hour or more, depending on the designer’s experience. That’s well below the $20 minimum wage the party pushes for in its platform, and lower than the $15 wage it helped pass this year in Seattle. Right-leaning sites promptly seized on what they saw as hypocrisy.
But Doug Barnes, the party’s national secretary, told The Huffington Post on Saturday that the group relies heavily on donations from low-wage workers and could not afford to pay much to an inexperienced designer.

Now, I don’t think anyone — even socialists — is obligated to pay above the legal minimum. But the irony here is still delicious.

I wrote a column about Seattle’s decision back in June.

The Seattle City Council is very pleased with itself. Answering President Obama’s call to address what he has decided is “the defining issue of our time” – income inequality – the Council voted unanimously last week to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 per hour. “This is a victory for our movement,” said council member Kshama Sawant, a socialist. “Fifteen in Seattle is just the beginning.”
For the sake of low-wage workers, I hope not.

I invoked Dr. Piketty:

The Council summoned the left’s hero du jour in its ordinance: “Whereas, the noted economist Thomas Piketty wrote in his landmark book Capital in the 21st Century, the need to act on income inequality is profound.”
Like many who call upon Dr. Piketty, the council seems not to have read his book. Here is what Piketty says about the minimum wage: “It seems likely that the increase in the minimum wage of nearly 25 percent (from $7.25 to $9 an hour) currently envisaged by the Obama administration will have little or no effect on the number of jobs. Obviously, raising the minimum wage cannot continue indefinitely: as the minimum wage increases, the negative effects on the level of employment eventually win out. If the minimum wage were doubled or tripled, it would be surprising if the negative impact were not dominant.”

You can read the whole column here.

— Michael R. Strain is a resident scholar and economist at the American Enterprise Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/MichaelRStrain.