The Living Wage Illusion

By David Nace

Like so many other concepts promoted by the left, self-proclaimed progressives and their allies in organized labor have used the term “living wage” to mislead the public and justify government intervention in this case on behalf of organized labor. While the term “living wage” evokes sympathy and sounds innocuous, the real objective of the “living wage” in the eyes of organized labor is to use the coercive power of the government to unionize millions of new workers at the expense of the taxpayer and the American economy.

Progressives utilize government intervention to enable workers to receive far more than market value for their services through labor union coercion and collectivism. The “living wage” concept is closely related to the Marxist theory of surplus labor. Marx used surplus labor theory to create class envy and create the illusion that workers could never receive the fair value of their efforts. He used this concept to justify a violent overthrow of capitalism and replacement with worker run communism. However under communism, workers were constrained to lives of misery in support of Communist Party officials.

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