The Senate and the House of Representatives are now agreed on the terms of the new minimum wage law —the Senate, which had pleaded for the more demagogic of the two proposals, won out, with the help of Lyndon Johnson. The result is that we shall have a new minimum wage of $1.60 per hour beginning on February 1, 1968, not February 1, 1969 as originally proposed by the House of Representatives. It is all grist for the election mill, and the pity of it is that so many people continue to defend the minimum wage idea as a humanitarian concept.
Which, as it happens, the minimum wage simply is not. If there is a reputable economist in the United States who defends the minimum wage law in terms of its pretended benefits for the poor, he has yet to surface. The minimum wage law is an instrument by which the middle class worker, precisely at the expense of the poor, effects a redistribution of income to his benefit.
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