Religion & Liberty Online

Socialists Love Everything About $20 Minimum Wages (Except Paying Such Wages Themselves)

socialist_unity_poster_by_party9999999-d4bphbmThere’s something almost charming about people in American who champion socialism. Yes, their economic views are naive and destructive. And yes most people (though especially the poor) would be much worse off if their vision for “progress” was actually implemented. But it’s hard to be too concerned when they are, at heart, really just capitalists who like to play political dress up.

Consider one of their favorite causes, a $20 minimum wage. In their most recent party platform, the Freedom Socialist Party advocated for raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour. Naturally, you might assume that the Freedom Socialist Party would be a great place to work for since the minimum pay you’d received is $20 an hour, an annual salary of $40,000 per year. But that assumption would be based on their applying their socialist principles to themselves. In reality, of course, their wages are based on the tenets of free enterprise.

Last week the party posted a notice on Craigslist that they were looking for a web developer. The pay: $13 an hour.

Like all good capitalists running a business or organization, I’m sure they have a good reason for offering the wages they do. But as good socialists, how do they justify such “slave wages”?

(Via: AEI Ideas)

Joe Carter

Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. He is the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible and co-author of How to Argue like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator (Crossway).