The argument for an increase in the minimum wage ought not to rely on or focus on economics. The political, ethical, and social reasons for higher minimum wages make the case better, more clearly and more definitively.   Economists have accumulated a vast literature on the minimum wage. That literature is divided into two opposing schools. The first, comprised of paid spokespersons for business and their various allies in politics, media and the academy, strives to establish the following sort of argument.

  The transitions from feudalism and other pre-capitalist economic systems to modern capitalism have always and everywhere been celebrated for bringing a new epoch of human history. Freedom, democracy, and equality were the hallmarks of those celebrations. The French Revolution of 1789 raised the slogan of liberte, egalite, fraternite. The US has long celebrated its capitalism for producing a vast “middle class” that permanently overcame previous societies’ tendencies toward extreme inequalities of wealth and income.

In capitalist enterprises across the US, when the working day ends and employees return to their homes, many stop at bars along the way. Signs invite them in for a “Happy Hour” of drinking. The implication is that the previous hours – working – are the day’s unhappy hours. Similarly, current mainstream academic economics (“neoclassical economics”) ascribes “disutility” to labor, an absolute and universal characteristic of labor per se.

  A crucial fact going into the 2012 election was this: from October 2010 to October 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that average real wages of non-supervisory workers fell by 2.4 per cent. That deterioration for the mass of the US working class happened at the same time as the so-called “recovery” from the so-far worst period of the ongoing crisis (October 2008 to October 2010). That recovery benefited only portions of the financial industry, larger corporations, and the stock market.

Competing self-congratulations by political and utility company leaders - about how wonderfully they and the "first responders" performed in the wake of Sandy's floods and power outages - serve to hide very serious and dangerous failures to anticipate, prevent or adequately prepare for such events.

  The ironies and absurdities of the Nobel Prize in economics announced today are more than any short note could possibly cover. So I will comment here on only one of them.   The two winners, Alvin E. Roth of Harvard University and Lloyd Shapley of UCLA, worked on the details of markets, on market “failures,” and on how markets might be adjusted to fail less.

  Today’s New York Times column by Paul Krugman achieves a new low. "Good news" for workers? Wow. Maybe ignoring criticisms of Keynesian economics from the left all these years has made Krugman see no need to deal with them; after all his job now seems to be to attack the Republicans for Mr Obama's benefit.   Lets see; as important as having a job - and we are not yet even half way from the crisis peak of 10% unemployment back to the pre-crisis outrage of 5% unemployment - is what kind of job.

The latest employment report (for July 2012) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in Washington documents the utter failure of the political establishment to respond effectively to the crisis that began in December 2007. Unemployment remains over 8 %, more than 50% higher than it was in 2007. The U-6 figure published by the BLS that adds to these unemployed the numbers of marginal workers (those who gave up looking for work) and the part-timers who want full-time work has returned to 15% of the labor force, nearly 20 million Americans.

  The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), even as a Murdoch project, ought to know and do better than its lead opinion piece on “Tax Fairness” (July 23, 2012, p. A13). The gross pandering to right-wing self-delusion accomplished there by Ari Fleischer would win any economics student a well-deserved failing grade. The piece purports to interpret a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, “The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2008 and 2009 “.