Early Progressives Understood What Minimum Wages Do

The Daily Economy ^ | June 6, 2026 | Logan Tantibanchachai

[chickenlips]

Pennsylvania and Virginia recently passed legislation to increase their minimum wage to $15 per hour, closing the gap with Oregon ($15.55 as of July 1) and California ($17.90 in some places). In all, 34 states mandate a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. The potential economic detriments of a minimum wage — namely, job losses — are well known. But the trend toward higher and higher minimum wages ought to prompt us to reconsider their purpose.

The standard assumption about progressivism is that it’s intrinsically good — after all, who would oppose progress? Progressivism in the twentieth-century, though, had a much more squirrely history. Many progressives were proponents of eugenics, opponents of classical liberalism, and advocates of scientific racism. And the origins of the federal minimum wage emerged from these attitudes.

Compared to today’s progressives, early twentieth-century progressive economists were at least honest and understood the impact of a minimum wage — they knew that it would cause job losses. But they believed the job losses caused by the minimum wage were a social benefit, not a detriment.

As the historian Thomas Leonard summarized it:

Sidney and Beatrice Webb put it plainly: ‘With regard to certain sections of the population [the ‘unemployable’], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.’

‘[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,’ Sidney Webb opined in the Journal of Political Economy, ‘the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.’ … A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants and also by removing from employment the ‘unemployable,’ who, thus identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: economics; employment; progressives; wages

[chickenlips]

The author gives modern progressives some credit for good intentions, but this is incorrect. Progressives still like minimum wages to keep people out of the job market, they're just better at making it sound compassionate now. After all they still like creating dependency as the Democrats have for almost 200 years.

[Mogger]

I read once that inflation cuts your money in half every 10 years.

Based on that, starting about 50 years ago, gas should be $32 a gallon.

Rent should be $6400 for an average apartment.

An average pickup truck should be $80,000.

Skilled blue collar income should be $224,000 a year.

The pickup turned out about right.

The minimum wage should also be much higher than it is, but not by the force of government action.