Conservatives Support Hike in Minimum Wage

Our media naturally tends to cover stories that are surprising or unexpected far more than boringly routine ones, and this has certainly been a central aspect of my ongoing initiative campaign to raise the California minimum wage to $12 per hour, the highest rate in America.

Labor unions and some prominent liberals have promoted minimum wage hikes for many years with mixed success and often scanty coverage, typically breaking into the headlines only when raucous public protests draw television cameras or print photographers. But given my reputation as a conservative Republican, I needed merely to draft my ballot measure on a single sheet of paper and prepare a $200 filing-fee to generate a major story in The New York Times, followed by considerable secondary coverage. Perhaps that might seem unfair, but I suspect that any prominent liberal who launched an effort to totally abolish all capital gains taxes would draw similar attention. Man bites dog trumps dog bites man.

However, in the ninety days since my initiative was filed, men have begun biting dogs at a truly remarkable rate, drawing wonderment from many outside observers.

Soon after I began my effort, I was interviewed by the hosts of several leading conservative talk-radio stations and their initial shock at my idea quickly turned to surprise at the cogency of my conservative arguments for the proposal. Cutting social welfare spending, saving taxpayer dollars, eliminating hidden subsidies, making work pay—those all sound like longstanding conservative policy goals. What sensible conservative could oppose them?

A few weeks later, Phyllis Schlafly, an iconic conservative sometimes regarded as Pat Buchanan’s female counterpart, publicly declared for a higher minimum wage in her syndicated column, citing the same reasons that I had, thereby providing me with my first big-name public ally on the right.

Soon afterward, The Daily Caller, one of America’s most widely read conservative publications interviewed me on the topic, publishing a blistering 2,500 explication of my position, with tone and title of the piece emphasizing my argument that a $12 minimum wage might constitute the “rocket fuel” conservatives needed to revitalize their movement and broaden their political base. (In Wisconsin, the minimum wage is $7.25, the same as the federal rate, and Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican leaders who control both houses of the state legislature oppose an increase in the minimum wage.)

A few days later, almost certainly as a consequence of the Dailer Caller article, Bill O’Reilly—the biggest conservative star on television—used his Fox News show to declare his support for big minimum wage hike, endorsing the Democratic Congressional proposal of a $10 figure.

With several dogs now licking their man-bites, the San Francisco Chronicle published a major front-page story and then a quick follow-up on this sudden epidemic of rabid conservatives promoting a minimum wage hike.

Soon afterward, Joel Fox, former longtime president of California’s enormously influential Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, contacted me and solicited a minimum wage article for his highly-regarded Fox & Hounds webzine, which had previously run several pieces on the other side of the issue. I jumped at the opportunity to present “The Conservative Case for a Higher Minimum Wage” to his readership, and was quite pleased at the reaction. Given his current role as president of the Small Business Action Committee, which during 2012 spent some $42 million to oppose Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax hike ballot measure, Fox’s conservative credentials on fiscal and economic matters obviously remain as strong as could possibly be imagined.

A week or two later, I published an article in Forbes arguing that Walmart—America’s largest low-wage employer and often treated as the Great Satan by pro-minimum wage activists—would benefit greatly from policies that would lift the disposable incomes of their struggling customer base, a point I had been making for several years. By fortuitous circumstances, my article was immediately brought to the personal attention of a prominent Walmart board member, and perhaps coincidentally, less than two weeks later, a story on Bloomberg Financial News carried the shocking headline “Wal-Mart Says ‘Looking’ at Support of Minimum Wage Rise”. The breaking Bloomberg story was quickly republished across numerous other major business media outlets and Tweeted out several hundred times,

Within hours, Walmart had denied the Bloomberg account and claimed that its official position on a minimum wage hike remained unchanged as being completely “neutral,” with the remarks of its corporate spokesman having been misinterpreted; but the incident was certainly a very odd one. I find it difficult to believe that Walmart’s official spokesman would be careless in his words and equally unlikely that Bloomberg journalists—the gold standard for breaking business news—would have totally mischaracterized the position of America’s largest corporation on such a sensitive matter. Slate also found the events very curious, and reported my own speculation that Walmart’s remarks had constituted a trial balloon in support of a minimum wage , with the company quickly caving under massive pressure from the Congressional Republican leadership, who are desperately trying to hold their own ranks firm against a Democratic-sponsored minimum wage hike.

Large corporations try to avoid political crossfire and possible punishment at the hands of a political party that controls the House and half the governorships. But technology multi-billionaires are far less vulnerable and can speak their minds much more freely, if they are so inclined. And one of the most outspoken of such individuals is Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal, earliest backer of Facebook, and a legendary figure in Silicon Valley investment circles. Late last week, a San Francisco reporter asked Thiel what he thought about my $12 minimum wage initiative, and he said he suggested that the idea might have considerable merit given the enormous problems inherent in our existing social welfare system.

Now there are exist a multitude of different types of conservatives, with Phyllis Schlafly and Bill O’Reilly being social conservatives who are often populist in their economic sentiments. So their support for a minimum wage hike was perhaps not nearly as surprising as the media believed. But Thiel is widely regarded as perhaps the staunchest conservative-libertarian in America on economic issues, having been the largest financial backer of Ron Paul in 2012 and considered far harder-core than the Koch brothers. His public sentiments favoring a $12 minimum wage constituted an ideological thunderclap, and was treated as such, generating major articles in ThinkProgress and the Huffington Post, and quickly generating over 700 Tweets, nearly twice the number of the Bloomberg piece on Walmart, perhaps because Thiel’s minimum wage support was twice as astonishing as the pro-hike sentiments of our top corporate retailer.

Around the same time, Debra Saunders, one of California’s most prominent Republican-leading columnists, wrote a piece treating my arguments in favor of my California initiative in very respectful fashion and the Los Angeles Times released a major Q&A with me on the same subject. Also, an Associated Press feature with the provocative title “5 Tycoons Who Want to Close the Wealth Gap” just ran in a large number of publications; although I was enormously flattered at being included in the august company of Warren Buffett, I must emphasize that my own personal wealth is so microscopic compared to Oracle of Omaha that I found the juxtaposition more humorous and ironic than anything else.

Finally, the latest issue of the Weekly Standard carried a 2,000 word article by Irwin Stelzer, director of economic policy at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, in which he endorses the minimum wage hike proposed by the Democrats in Congress and rebuts the contrary arguments based on the CBO report. My impression is that Stelzer has always been quite close to Rupert Murdoch, which raises the intriguing question of whether public endorsements by the Wall Street Journal andFox News can be far behind.

Meanwhile, the growing cries of man-bitten dogs continue to echo across the land. At this rate, the major news media may soon revise its preconceptions and conclude that supporting a minimum wage hike is just another typical conservative position similar to opposing gun control.

A version of this story was previously published at the Unz Review.