Among the hotly contested list of Joe Biden’s promises is an increase of the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
There are plenty of sound reasons to oppose government minimum wage laws, but there is one objection making the rounds that is based on bad economics and should be avoided, and that’s the “businesses will pass on the costs to consumers” objection.
For instance, a now deleted tweet by someone claiming that a $15 minimum hourly wage will cause Taco Bell burritos to explode in cost was shot down in short order by the tweet below. Scrolling through the replies also shows hundreds of other similar responses from people in cities that already have a $15 minimum wage. Indeed, the responses were so decisive and numerous that the original poster deleted his

A belief still commonly held today by not just Marxists and socialists, but progressives of many stripes, is the insistence that employers are “stealing” part of their workers’ labor because the wage workers receive from their employer are less than the contribution of their labor to the final value (i.e., selling price) of the finished good.
Profit to the employer, the argument goes, is akin to theft from the workers. Profit is “surplus value” created by the worker but taken by the capitalist, they say.
This surplus value represents an exploitative “wage theft” of sorts, and, importantly, is an exploitation that would not exist under a socialist economic system, according to their argument.
But in his 1891 book The Positive Theory of Capital, Eugen von

That’s a question USA Today posed to three “policy experts on the left and the right” in this recent article. The responses, while unsurprising, were nevertheless disappointing.
For libertarians, economic inequality itself is not problematic, as long as it is in the context of an unfettered market economy free of government privileges and interference.
Of course, that’s not what we have. But instead of advocating for a more free economy to address inequality, the “experts” consulted by USA Today advocate for more state interference that would likely make inequality worse while ignoring perhaps the largest source of inequality, the Federal Reserve.
First up is Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute, who focuses on income mobility. Winship points out