In doing some research on classical vs modern liberalism, I came across an interesting question: Would someone who advocates setting (and increasing) a minimum wage for laborers agree that there should be a minimum wage for artists of various sorts? Should there be some sort of government mandate that says, for example, that if a writer spent 200 hours writing an essay, that essay could not be purchased by a publisher for less than a set dollar figure? How about an artist selling paintings on a street corner? What if a piece took him 50 hours to produce, yet he had it for sale for $50? Should the government send regulators out to enjoin him from selling that art for less than $362.50, plus cost of materials? The difficulty of verifying hours worked aside, isn’t it an affront to our senses to think that an artist and a buyer of art cannot come to agreement on an economic transaction, mutually agreeable, without a third party declaring its sufficiency?
Certainly, if you suggest to, well, anyone, that your local street artist shouldn’t be allowed to peddle his wares unless he charges a minimum price per piece, they’d look at you incredulously. While the Left tends to support government funding for the arts, that support doesn’t, to my knowledge, include any notions or mandates that have a “minimum wage” sensibility to them. How do we reconcile, then, the mandate for a minimum wage for a McDonald’s worker vs the lack of one for a freelance writer, a community theater actor, a street corner sketch artist, and the like? How do we defend mandating a base rate of pay for unskilled labor, but none for activities that often require a great deal of skill, practice and possibly unique sparks of inspiration?
Rationalizations abound. They might address the nebulous distinction between “hobby” and “labor.” They might include some analysis that considers there to be a difference in “societal benefit” between an artist who creates and a laborer who performs rote activities. It could be noted that learning skills (aka practicing, rehearsing, etc) is something that even wage workers can do on their own time and thus isn’t subject to minimum wage laws. The IRS distinguishes wage work from “contract work” and has delineations and rules regarding “exempt” and “non-exempt” employees regarding such things as overtime and wage vs salary. Yet, when considered with consistency as a priority, the rationalizations are just that – rationalizations. They’re excuses for imposing external constraints on the economic liberty of some but not of others, excuses typically made in the name of “protecting” the weakest in society from exploitation.
But, if protecting people from poor economic choices is a legitimate role of government, shouldn’t that protection extend to the economic choice to be a starving artist or actor rather than to work a paying job? Isn’t the logical extension of the minimum wage i.e. “you aren’t allowed to work for Joe unless Joe pays you X, even if you’re OK being paid Less-Than-X” to tell people “you aren’t allowed to go to open mike nights at the comedy club because you’re not earning enough of a living,” or “if you want to sell that painting, you have to charge at least minimum wage x the hours you put into it + the cost of materials?” Can’t we extend that logic of protection to saying “you must devote 40 hours a week to a job that pays minimum wage, instead of waiting on casting-call lines?”
Of course all those scenarios are offensive and ridiculous. The first distinction that will be made is that people are free to act as they will with their own free time, but if they’re going to work for someone else, there must be rules to protect them. Yet, isn’t the notion of “free time” rooted in individual choice? How do we resolve the idea that people are free to act as they wish with the restriction that the minimum wage law imposes on that freedom?
There is a very strong case to be made that the liberty that has been most degraded by a century of progressivism in this nation is economic liberty. We still have fairly robust speech, press and religion rights, as well as fairly solid rights against self-incrimination. Freedom from unreasonable search has been taking a pretty hard beating over recent years, especially since 9/11, but economic freedom has been flayed far more severely. There is virtually no economic activity that one can legally engage in that isn’t subject to a laundry list of government regulations and regulatory agencies, and, unfortunately, much of the population wants it so. Yet it remains not only morally indefensible but terribly inconsistent and illogical.
As is true for so many instances of government meddling, the imposition of a minimum wage has spawned an on-going proliferation of rules and an ever-growing bureaucracy to administer those rules. Apart from the policing of compliance, there is the need as I noted above to specify what sort of work is protected by minimum wage and overtime laws, what sort of work is considered “contract” work, which workers are exempt from overtime and hourly wage mandates, under what circumstances a person is allowed to “intern” for an employer, and so forth. Sometimes these rules seem to have some sort of logic to them, other times they don’t, but it’s usually true that they’re written because someone with some sort of authority doesn’t like the “natural” (i.e. free market) result of the broader rule. It’s also usually true that these rules favor constituencies that are louder or more “important” come election time, and penalize constituencies that aren’t as valuable to politicians. We are hearing the drumbeat for higher minimum wages from numerous quarters (usually, possibly exclusively, liberal ones). Given both the moral indefensibility of infringing upon economic liberty and the practical truth that setting a minimum wage higher than the level at which the market would equilibrate has adverse economic effects, we are led to conclude that these calls for higher minimum wages are just ploys to buy votes with other people’s money. But since employees are many, employers are few, and busybodies who think they should have a say in those relationships are increasingly common, there isn’t a whole lot of resistance.
Perhaps, then, we should encourage the busybodies to expand the coverage of minimum wage laws to artists. Perhaps we should demand that actors in community theater get paid, including for the time spent in rehearsals and on script memorization. Perhaps we should insist that street corner artists log and compute their studio time in pricing their art pieces. Perhaps we should ban “open mike” nights at comedy clubs, or the practice of insisting that a comic have at least X people show up and pay admission before they can get on stage. And, if these mandates kill off street art, if they cause community theaters to shut down, if they force comedy clubs to go dark on Mondays and Tuesdays, well, in the words of Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz:
The idea that any job is better than no job should no longer apply.
I suppose more people on unemployment will make the liberals happy.
Loading ...
Active Comment Threads
Most Commented Posts
Universal Background Checks – A Back Door to Universal Registration
COVID Mask Follies
When Everything Is Illegal…
An Anti-Vax Inflection Point?
“Not In My Name”
The Great Social Media Crackup
War Comes Through The Overton Window
The First Rule of Italian Driving
Most Active Commenters