Minimum wage hikes are an easy pander - thank politicians for "giving you a raise," and don't think about all the jobs they destroyed! - but they're also an important weapon in the Left's war on the middle class.
Political tinkering with the minimum wage teaches people to think of employment as a gift from the State, rather than an exercise of capitalist freedom. The Left needs to keep poor and middle-class people from seeing themselves as capitalists selling their labor for profit.
An immediate practical benefit of minimum wage hikes for socialists is that they destroy the jobs poor people need to climb into the middle class. It's like blowing up bridges so the enemy can't get reinforcements. Blowing up the on-ramps to employment secures welfare dependency.
Politicians are confident they can escape blame for wiping out jobs with minimum wage hikes. They can always scream those were "lousy jobs" nobody should want anyway. Usually they can blame the rising unemployment they created on private-sector employers.
The unemployment created by hiking the minimum wage is politically useful to the Left. It increases the alienation of labor from capital - people are taught to hate the capitalists who refuse to hire them, and love the politicians who cushion their joblessness with benefits.
Hiking the minimum wage also damages wage growth and upward mobility. When the price of labor is close to its true value, employers like to hire lots of people and promote those who show promise. It makes sense - lots of hands on deck, easy to replace those who don't work out.
When the price of labor is forced far above its value, on the other hand, employers hire fewer people and there is less room for promotion. A large class of permanent unemployables and permanently under-employed people forms. There are fewer ladders up to the middle class.
You could say that much of parasitic government hides in the gaps politicians create between price and value. Labor is just one of many vital goods whose value is almost completely obscured from the common man. Most have no idea how much it really costs to employ them.
A good salesman knows the value of what he's selling, right? But political tinkering with wages, and heavy political burdens laid on employment, leave most of us fumbling to sell a resource - our own labor - without knowing its value. It hinders our ability to sell.
A healthy middle class is DYNAMIC. Young people move into it by finding employment, and climb higher with success. People rise to higher income levels through hard work, investment, and entrepreneurial success. It's a perpetual blur of motion that creates real value.
A politically controlled labor market, on the other hand, is static and dead. It's hard to break generational unemployment cycles by finding scarce jobs, advancement opportunities are limited, entrepreneurship for anyone who isn't already rich becomes very difficult.
Huge corporations can absorb minimum wage hikes far more easily than small businesses, especially startups. Pity the little guy who struggles to launch a tiny enterprise when the government forces him to pay $15 an hour, plus huge burdens, for the labor he needs.
And with labor prices forced far above value, upward mobility is replaced by guaranteed sinecures for people who paid huge, government-inflated prices for the "right credentials." Classes become rigid castes. Human capital no longer increases in value naturally over time.
Socialist utopia is a land of castes, not classes - a permanent elite secure in its power and privilege, using a permanent underclass as its vast and perpetually aggrieved political army. There is less MOVEMENT, both economically and literally under nutball green energy schemes.
The best way to get those lousy deplorables to stop moving around so much is to wipe out the on-ramps to employment, success, and entrepreneurship. Small businesses have to go - they're too unruly, too difficult to coopt for political purposes, too invested in capitalist freedom.
The Left can dominate and politicize big corporations by inducting their top executives into the Party and putting activists into key positions to enforce Party ideology across the company. Good luck doing that to millions of small businesses run by hard-working entrepreneurs!
And there's no better way to wipe out small businesses and subdue the middle class than cranking up the minimum wage to price labor out of their reach, especially when they're already reeling from Covid-19. Now is the moment to separate the people from capitalism forever. /end
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