Should There Be a Minimum Wage?
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The government should protect the poor. The rich can look after themselves, but the poor have nothing to fall back on and must depend on the state. Since most wage earners are poor, the government should protect them, including by making sure their wages are enough to live on.
Pope Leo XIII made this argument in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. He wrote that wage-earners “should be specially cared for and protected by the government” (§37), and that wages “ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner” (§45).
the poor have nothing to fall back on and must depend on the state.
That doesn’t follow.
must depend on the state.
The poor would have more voluntary charities to fall back if the welfare state hadn’t crowded them out. There used to be a flourishing network of charity organizations until the emergence of the mega welfare state in the 1960s.
Since most wage earners are poor, the government should protect them, including by making sure their wages are enough to live on.
If I would like to work some job for $10/hour, but the state says I can’t accept the job for less than $11, at which rate it is not being offered, then the state is dooming me to be unemployed. It’s become my destroyer, not my protector.