David Brooks Cannot Get Himself To Support Higher Wages

The New York Times columnist would rather have the government subsidize shitty employers than give people a raise.

It took David Brooks nearly a decade after the financial crisis to realize that the American economy only benefits the few, not the many.

Keen to show off his newly acquired common touch, Brooks devotes his latest column to revealing capitalism’s “structural flaws,” all while still arguing that conservative economics (the very ideology that helped us arrive at unprecedented inequality) is the best solution.

He writes:

Conservatives tend to like their redistribution done at the local level, and they like to use market-friendly mechanisms, like child tax credits, mobility vouchers and wage subsidies.

While I’m glad that David Brooks has finally started championing redistribution, these policies merely allow employers to continue paying terrible wages. It is in no way conservative to pass the responsibility of compensation from the employer to the tax payer—that’s simply a bailout by another name.

If you want a “mobility voucher” or a “wage subsidy,” try raising the minimum wage. Or raising the overtime threshold. Or providing a guaranteed federal jobs program. These approaches seem just as “market-friendly” as artificially supporting tragically low-wage employers in the richest nation on earth. And they have the added benefit of not requiring the American people to subsidize parasitic companies.

Some conservatives like Brooks would reply that creating a wage floor or offering a guaranteed job distorts the marketplace, but why is that sort of government intervention any less market-friendly than propping up a lopsided economic system?

Even if he thinks his approach is financially conservative, Brooks is still placing a lot of trust and power in the government to help people. Yet this faith in the state is peculiar considering that in the past he has lambasted Americans for their “absurd view of the power of government.”

Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their sins. Then they get angry and cynical when it turns out that it can’t.

Dismiss, if you can, the repulsive use of the word “sin” here and focus on his Koch-esque contempt for the social safety net. Such a statement highlights two incompatible viewpoints: Brooks is advocating for policies that make Americans more economically dependent upon the state, while also pining for a nation whose people don’t depend on government assistance.

The cognitive dissonance here is quite remarkable, even for David Brooks.

The only way he could reconcile these perspectives is through believing a flawed assumption; that making businesses pay people more leads to less jobs—and so, the government must step in and be the lifeline for their citizens to prosper.

But that assumption has been proven wrong again and again. For decades, conservatives like Brooks have been aiding and abetting our low-wage economy by brutally playing on the economic fears of the vulnerable. These thinkers love to talk about the wonders of capitalism, but it’s a little suspicious how the world’s best economic system all of a sudden becomes incredibly fragile and vulnerable when low-wage earners demand higher wages.

Raising pay, contrary to conservative cries, does not lead to terrible unemployment or bad economies, as recent reports from Seattle just indicated. Here, we’ve raised our minimum wage to “insane” levels and we now have a 2.6 percent unemployment rate—a record low. And a low-wage job is now considered anything under $19-an-hour!

That is a mobility voucher that I can get behind. It raises wages, it boosts the local economy (because low-wage earners can now afford to actually buy stuff), and it gets government out of the way. A progressive policy like the minimum wage ends up being less interventionist and more effective than any of Brooks’ subsidy policies.

You’d think conservatives and progressives could unite around this type of limited economic intervention, but David Brooks once again illustrates how tribal our belief systems can be. Let’s hope that he comes around to supporting raising people’s wages via the employer quicker than it took him to realize that modern capitalism is flawed.