California’s minimum wage law is the latest and largest victory in a powerful movement pushing for higher minimum wages across the United States. Supporters of this movement argue that the current minimum wage is too low to allow workers to make ends meet.

But the minimum wage is a bad tool for those whose goal is to ease the burdens of poverty. And the California law – which mandates a very high wage across a very large population – is an especially bad idea.

Here are just a few reasons why:

My point here isn’t that government should do nothing to help the poor. It’s that minimum wage laws are a bad way of going about trying to provide that help. That’s why even John Rawls thought that the minimum wage was a bad idea. Of course he thought we should have income redistribution. But the best way to do that is to let the labor market do what markets are generally quite good at – efficiently allocating resources and creating a social surplus – and then use the power of government to ensure that everybody gets an equitable (or, on my view, sufficient) share of the wealth the market creates.

Rawls thought that something like Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax could be an efficient way of achieving that redistribution. I think he’s right, and many others have made the same point. Unlike the minimum wage, a Negative Income Tax or Universal Basic Income (the two are often functionally identical) targets poverty, not employment. And it does so without creating the distortionary and unemployment effects of a minimum wage.

California likes to think of itself as a state on the cutting edge. But the minimum wage is a policy which, if it ever had a time at all, that time has past. Raising the minimum wage to $15 is an ineffective way to fight poverty which could have disastrous unintended consequences for the most vulnerable workers. If California wants to be smart about fighting poverty, it should follow the lead of the Finns, and consider a Negative Income Tax.

This post first appeared at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.