While con­sid­er­ing these doom-and-gloom pre­dic­tions, it’s use­ful to recall the debate that took place near­ly 80 years ago, when Franklin Roo­sevelt first tried to estab­lish a nation­al min­i­mum wage in the Unit­ed States, as part of the New Deal. The Fair Labor Stan­dards Act (FLSA), which was intro­duced to Con­gress in 1937, aimed to elim­i­nate sweat­shop con­di­tions by estab­lish­ing a min­i­mum wage, a max­i­mum work week, and out­law­ing child labor. It also ini­tial­ly sug­gest­ed a five-mem­ber board that could raise wages and short­en work­ing hours on a case-by-case basis. Dur­ing June 1937, Con­gress held three hear­ings invit­ing pub­lic com­ment on the pro­posed law.

In fact, on Tues­day, sev­er­al Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates made some of these very argu­ments, kick­ing off the lat­est GOP debate by stat­ing their oppo­si­tion to the Fight for 15 move­ment. Ben Car­son claimed that, as a black youth, he would nev­er have been hired as a lab assis­tant ​“if some­one had to pay me a large amount of mon­ey.” Sim­i­lar­ly, Mar­co Rubio protest­ed that, ​“if you raise the min­i­mum wage, you’re going to make peo­ple more expen­sive than a machine.” He instead pro­posed help­ing wages to rise ​“nat­u­ral­ly” by putting for­ward pro-busi­ness pro­pos­als that would assumed­ly trick­le down to workers.

The main points of the con­ser­v­a­tive argu­ment against rais­ing the min­i­mum wage tend to be as fol­lows: Increas­ing it would lead busi­ness­es to either raise prices or fire work­ers (or both) in order to deal with a spi­ral­ing cost of labor. This means that while some work­ers would be lift­ed out of pover­ty, many would lose their jobs, plung­ing them into greater finan­cial straits, while all con­sumers would lose out from pay­ing more for goods and ser­vices. This would iron­i­cal­ly hit young, inex­pe­ri­enced and low-skill work­ers the hard­est, as they have the least bar­gain­ing pow­er and are typ­i­cal­ly the first to be fired. It is there­fore bet­ter to let the mar­ket take its course and allow busi­ness­es to grad­u­al­ly raise their wages of their own accord.

Over the past year, the cam­paign to raise the min­i­mum wage has been steadi­ly accu­mu­lat­ing promi­nence, polit­i­cal allies and, most impor­tant­ly, suc­cess­es. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, it has also occa­sioned a push­back from con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians and colum­nists who view its increase as a mis­guid­ed, self-defeat­ing folly.

The FLSA as pro­posed wasn’t per­fect. Like oth­er New Deal leg­is­la­tion, it exclud­ed farm work­ers as a mat­ter of polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy, as a large share of agri­cul­tur­al labor­ers were African Amer­i­cans in the south, and Roo­sevelt need­ed the sup­port of south­ern con­gress­men to get it and future laws passed. Not only that, but as one of the law’s pro­po­nents said in the hear­ings regard­ing the fig­ure of 40 cents an hour that was being dis­cussed at the time (around $6.60 in 2015 dol­lars): ​“it would be a calami­ty if such a wage min­i­mum as that referred to should in any way be con­strued as a liv­ing wage.” Still, though inad­e­quate, the bill’s sup­port­ers saw it as a wor­thy first step.

The bill’s crit­ics also saw it as a first step, although for them it was decid­ed­ly in the wrong direc­tion. While some were sole­ly out­raged at the idea of an unelect­ed board of men being giv­en what they saw as dic­ta­to­r­i­al pow­er over busi­ness­es, many were against the very con­cept of a min­i­mum wage — even one as mea­ger as that pro­posed. Their objec­tions and pre­dic­tions will sound very famil­iar to any­one fol­low­ing the min­i­mum wage debate today. Here’s John E. Edger­ton, Pres­i­dent of the South­ern States Indus­tri­al Coun­cil, an orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sent­ing south­ern businesses:

we con­fess our fail­ure to under­stand how it is pos­si­ble to improve the con­di­tions of the under­paid of the over­worked by a statute whose inevitable effect will be to increase great­ly the cost of pro­duc­tion, thus an inescapable advance in prices.

Edger­ton went on to warn that rais­ing the wage uni­form­ly would inevitably put south­ern man­u­fac­tur­ers out of busi­ness. ​“Are work­ers bet­ter off with­out jobs?” he asked.

J. D. Bat­tle of the Nation­al Coal Asso­ci­a­tion saw a sim­i­lar tra­jec­to­ry for busi­ness­es if the bill was passed:

There is no break in the chain of cause and effect: increased hourly wages, increased cost per unit of prod­uct, a high­er sell­ing price, a falling off in demand, decreased pro­duc­tion, and decreased employment.

As Robert Dress­er of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Man­u­fac­tur­ers (NAM) — an anti-union orga­ni­za­tion of assort­ed busi­ness­es that fought var­i­ous New Deal laws — told the con­gress­men: ​“you can­not leg­is­late a nation into prosperity.”

Just like today, 1930s con­ser­v­a­tives warned that those at the bot­tom of the lad­der would be hurt most by a min­i­mum wage. Guy L. Har­ring­ton of the Nation­al Pub­lish­ers’ Asso­ci­a­tion warned the impo­si­tion of a min­i­mum wage would ​“throw all sub­stan­dard or mar­gin­al work­ers out of employ­ment as a bur­den to soci­ety,” while Bat­tle pre­sent­ed let­ters from two dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es claim­ing low-skill work­ers – or ​“those who are not suf­fi­cient­ly com­pe­tent to earn their pay” – would quick­ly lose their jobs once the law was passed. A num­ber of those tes­ti­fy­ing, such Noël Sar­gent of NAM, even argued that the bill would ​“make the next depres­sion worse than would oth­er­wise be the case.”

Today, it’s also not unusu­al to hear con­ser­v­a­tives warn­ing that a hike in the min­i­mum wage will sim­ply lead busi­ness­es to replace flesh and blood work­ers with those made from met­al and wire, like sushi-mak­ing machines or ​“burg­er-flip­ping robots” that can do the job of unskilled work­ers for a frac­tion of the cost. This was also a claim made by those opposed to the FLSA. The man­ag­er of one Louisiana lum­ber com­pa­ny claimed that while the low cost of liv­ing in the South meant employ­ers hadn’t resort­ed to ​“labor-sav­ing machin­ery” thus far, wage increas­es beyond a cer­tain point would force them into doing so and ​“elim­i­nat­ing over half of [their] men.” Mean­while, the Under­wear Insti­tute warned that this and oth­er laws were push­ing up the cost of labor which would lead to ​“increased use of machin­ery with the effect of dis­plac­ing manpower.”

Final­ly, a num­ber of those tes­ti­fy­ing had near-apoc­a­lyp­tic visions of what the estab­lish­ment of a min­i­mum wage might mean. Har­ring­ton testified:

What is here­in stip­u­lat­ed has been tried many times and failed. Rome 2,000 years ago, fell because the gov­ern­ment began fix­ing the prices of ser­vices and com­modi­ties …We, how­ev­er, know what has always hap­pened when gov­ern­ments have tried to super­in­tend the indus­try of pri­vate per­sons. The final result has always been dis­tress, mis­ery, and despair.

He, like many oth­ers, argued the bill was putting the Unit­ed States on the road to ​“the com­plete cen­tral­iza­tion of Fed­er­al pow­er” and the cre­ation of ​“unlim­it­ed form of gov­ern­ment.” L. N. Bent, the Vice Pres­i­dent of the Her­cules Pow­der Com­pa­ny sim­i­lar­ly believed gov­ern­ment con­trol of wages would lead to gov­ern­ment con­trol of prices. Express­ing his resent­ment at the encroach­ment of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment on state affairs, Bat­tle con­clud­ed: ​“South Car­oli­na fired on Fort Sumter for far less pre­text than this bill affords.”

This wouldn’t be the last the Amer­i­can pub­lic would hear of this rhetoric. Year after year, decade after decade, these same argu­ments have been trot­ted out by min­i­mum wage oppo­nents each time a wage increase has been pro­posed. In 1961, one hotel man­ag­er lament­ed that if it the wage was increased, ​“you will be able to buy hotels cheap.” Joseph E. Chas­tain, the own­er of Lintz depart­ment stores, com­plained in 1966 that ​“no com­pa­ny our size can live under such cir­cum­stances. Undoubt­ed­ly we would have to liq­ui­date.” The com­pa­ny con­tin­ued to oper­ate for anoth­er 41 years. The Cham­ber of Com­merce warned on no less than four sep­a­rate occa­sions from 1975 to 1989 that min­i­mum wage ris­es would cost mil­lions of jobs. More recent­ly, in 2010, FOX News com­men­ta­tor John Stos­sel used vir­tu­al­ly the same words as Robert Dress­er did in 1937, stat­ing that, ​“We can­not leg­is­late pros­per­i­ty.” You can draw a straight line from 1937 to today’s warn­ings of ​“Destroy­ing jobs via wage diktats.”

Nor was the hyper­bolc rhetoric of col­lapse and dic­ta­to­r­i­al takeover lim­it­ed to the decade of the 1930s when it came to the min­i­mum wage. In 1960, Sen­a­tor Arthur Van­den­berg (R‑MI) warned that ​“Fed­er­al wage-fix­ing” was dri­ving the Unit­ed States ​“clos­er and ever clos­er to the cen­tral­ized author­i­tar­i­an state,” while Rep. Thomas Hage­dorn (R‑MN) cau­tioned that it ​“strikes at a basic under­pin­ning of our demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem.” As late as 1997, Mark Wil­son of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion was sug­gest­ing that set­ting a legal­ly man­dat­ed wage floor was ​“social­ism.”

The fact that con­ser­v­a­tives and busi­ness own­ers have been mak­ing the same claims about the min­i­mum wage for at least 80 years does not by itself auto­mat­i­cal­ly inval­i­date con­cerns about its increase. But it does sug­gest that con­ser­v­a­tive argu­ments should be tak­en with a grain of salt. Min­i­mum wage oppo­nents have tend­ed to view it as the har­bin­ger of eco­nom­ic dooms­day since its incep­tion, even when it was as mod­er­ate by today’s stan­dards as the FLSA of 1938 was. The fact that the sky hasn’t fall­en yet should tell us something.