Because Marco Rubio got generally high marks in last Tuesday’s debate, his positions should be closely scrutinized. There are two other real conservatives in the race, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and one of them might be a better choice. For conservatives.
In his answer to the first question, which was about the minimum wage, Senator Rubio said: “If I thought that raising the minimum wage was the best way to help people increase their pay, I would be all for it, but it isn’t.” Really?
At first hearing, that may seem like a good answer, but in fact it’s like the first sip on a hot summer day of a cold, but third-rate, white wine. What Rubio needed was the fruit of a little more philosophical reflection, which he should have done before going on stage to debate, perhaps even before going to the Senate. Henry Kissinger said, famously, that you have to do your thinking before you go to Washington. When you get there, there isn’t time to accumulate intellectual capital; you’re too busy spending it. (Messrs. Trump and Carson, please note.)
Rubio’s answer was correct: the minimum wage should not be raised. But his apparent reasoning was wrong. Even if requiring payment of a minimum wage would help a particular employee, why should an employer be required by government to spend his money helping, as distinguished from employing, a person? The point, and the correct answer, is: There shouldn’t be a minimum wage.
Employers ought to be free to pay their employees whatever they want to pay them—and whatever they need to pay them in order to get them to work. They have no obligation to be welfare providers.
And that’s a better answer structurally, too, because the same case can be made, mutatis mutandis, against probably thousands, or tens of thousands, of regulations imposed on businesses by the federal government. People ought to be free from all but the most necessary regulations.
The issue is freedom, not just, as Rubio puts it, “what works.” What, after all, is America all about? The answer to that question is the title of a book by the late M. Stanton Evans, one of the founders of the conservative movement: The Theme Is Freedom.
The case against a minimum wage is the same case that can be made for school choice. Parents ought to be free to choose what schools their children go to, not because their children will necessarily get a better education, nor even because Americans will then be able to beat the wily Japanese, whom God has put on earth for that purpose. Parents ought to be free to choose their children’s school because: parents ought to be free to choose their children’s school.
All this may seem to some like a quibble: C’mon, you know what Senator Rubio meant. The question was about the minimum wage, and he opposed it.
But his reasoning is important, because, as the philosopher Richard Weaver said, ideas have consequences.
Later the same evening, we should digress to note, Rubio took an oblique swipe at philosophers: “We need more welders and less [sic] philosophers.” In fact, what we probably need is more philosophers. But not every student can or should study philosophy. Some will profit more by learning a trade. On that point the senator was certainly correct.
But the consequence of Senator Rubio’s reasoning, if there was any, on the minimum wage also has led him to propose, for families with children, a trillion-dollar refundable tax credit—i.e., even people who haven’t paid taxes receive cash from the government. We must assume he thinks that proposal “will work.” Listen to the senator’s utilitarianism: “It is expensive to raise children in the 21st century, and families that are raising children are raising the future taxpayers of the United States….” Really?
If that’s true, let’s be even more utilitarian. Some of those children will be better taxpayers than others; and—this is important—we know which ones they are. They are the children who grow up in families with both a mother and a father in the house.
So here’s a proposal that “will work” even better than the senator’s: structure the refundable tax credit so that intact families get more than single-parent families (unless the single parent is a widow or widower). That would (in theory) encourage parents to stick together and raise better taxpayers.
But who’s going to pay for that program? Whose freedom is going to be curtailed in order to fund the senator’s centrally planned trillion-dollar program? And if a trillion-dollar program actually did work, how would we ever keep it from becoming a three-trillion-dollar program? Do I hear five trillion?
Better — more conservative, at least—to lower taxes and trust the people to use their freedom to make America great.
Better, Marco Rubio, to spend a little more time thinking about the philosophy of governing. If you can.