But our Constitution has at least one radical feature: It isn’t designed for a society with economic inequality.
.. Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.
.. From the ancient Greeks to the American founders, statesmen and political philosophers were obsessed with the problem of economic inequality. Unequal societies were subject to constant strife — even revolution. The rich would tyrannize the poor, and the poor would revolt against the rich.
.. The solution was to build economic class right into the structure of government. In England, for example, the structure of government balanced lords and commoners. In ancient Rome, there was the patrician Senate for the wealthy, and the Tribune of the Plebeians for everyone else. We can think of these as class-warfare constitutions: Each class has a share in governing, and a check on the other. Those checks prevent oligarchy on the one hand and a tyranny founded on populist demagogy on the other.
.. Our founding charter doesn’t have structural checks and balances between economic classes: not between rich and poor, and certainly not between corporate interests and ordinary workers. This was a radical change in the history of constitutional government.
And it wasn’t an oversight. The founding generation knew how to write class-warfare constitutions — they even debated such proposals during the summer of 1787. But they ultimately chose a framework for government that didn’t pit class against class.
.. James Madison’s notes from the secret debates at the Philadelphia Convention show that the delegates had a hard time agreeing on how they would design such a class-based system. But part of the reason was political: They knew the American people wouldn’t agree to that kind of government.
.. Many in the founding generation believed America was exceptional because of the extraordinary degree of economic equality within the political community as they defined it.
.. Equality of property, he believed, was crucial for sustaining a republic. During the Constitutional Convention, South Carolinan Charles Pinckney said America had “a greater equality than is to be found among the people of any other country.” As long as the new nation could expand west, he thought, it would be possible to have a citizenry of independent yeoman farmers.
.. Starting more than a century ago, amid the first Gilded Age, Americans confronted rising inequality, rapid industrial change, a communications and transportation revolution and the emergence of monopolies. Populists and progressives responded by pushing for reforms that would tame the great concentrations of wealth and power that were corrupting government.
On the economic side, they invented antitrust laws and public utilities regulation, established an income tax, and fought for minimum wages. On the political side, they passed campaign finance regulations and amended the Constitution so the people would get to elect senators directly. They did these things because they knew that our republican form of government could not survive in an economically unequal society. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching an economic democracy.”
Minnesota Federal Reserve President: If You Aren’t Raising Wages, Don’t Complain About Labor Shortages
“Are any of you planning to raise wages in the next year or two?” he asked. “Or are you just complaining that you can’t find workers and you’re not going to raise wages? I can tell you something. If you look at North Dakota in the oil boom, if you raise wages, people respond, and you can find workers.”
“If you aren’t raising wages, it just sounds like whining,” he concluded.
More than the Minimum Wage
It is easy to understand the frustration of (some of) these workers. Conservatives should not be glib about the fact that $7.25 per hour may buy you the bootstraps you’ll need to pull yourself up, but not much more. Average hourly wages of workers in the retail and leisure-and-hospitality industries have had a rough 5 or 10 years.
.. They found that only 11 percent of workers who would gain from raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour live in poor households, while 42 percent live in households with incomes 3 times the poverty line or more — considerably above America’s median household income.
.. Increasing the minimum wage lowers the cost of investing in a machine relative to employing a low-skill worker. Applebee’s intends to put tablet computers at every table to facilitate food and drink ordering.
.. Households headed by a full-time worker should not live in poverty. Conservatives, who champion work and earned success, should be the first to agree that more can be done to encourage these goals. They have a very simple option: Expand the Earned-Income Tax Credit.
.. For a single worker with two children in 2013, the EITC paid 40 cents for every dollar of earned income up to $13,430, providing a maximum subsidy of $5,372.
.. the EITC has some shortcomings. It can impose significant marriage penalties, and it gives very little help to childless workers.
.. If you earn $7.25 per hour, for every hour you work the government would cut you a check for 3 bucks.
.. Liberals have argued that programs like the EITC represent a subsidy from government to business.
.. Liberals, in supporting minimum-wage increases, implicitly argue that the employers of low-skill workers, together with consumers of the products and services the workers help provide, should bear the burden of ensuring that low-skill workers don’t live in poverty. Conservatives should reject this argument, insisting that all of society is responsible for helping the working poor — to escape poverty, to earn their own success, to flourish.