By passing this act, however, the state government has created a bit of mess. While proud of pushing the state government to increase the wage to its current rate, the Raise Michigan Coalition feels that 300,000 voices won’t be heard. This is due to the fact that the petition to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 takes issue with the old wage law. Since the new law is in effect, the petition may become a moot point, as groups such as the Michigan Restaurant Association argue, and will not become an issue to vote on in the November elections. If the petition is moot, then 300,000+ people may feel as if they have been ignored by their government. If the petition isn’t moot and makes the ballot, then democracy has spoken, and victory may be that much closer – right?

Well, this whole issue does not really improve the lot for labor. In the words the Industrial Workers of the World, labor law “is set up by the bosses and their government and courts system to keep you and me, the working stiffs, from coming together and fighting for our piece of the pie, for fear that we’ll want, and some day be able to take, the whole thing.” By pushing for reform, we are not helping labor, but giving the employer class what they want. With higher wages comes the push to automate jobs faster than people who can secure a living without having to be employed. Those who do not lose their jobs to automation will then have to deal with an even bigger workload due to a smaller workforce. As J. Edward Carp points out

Raising the minimum wage is a short term solution that creates more problems than it solves. Doing so only hastens the replacement of workers with machines, and without addressing the basic structure of state capitalism, with its socialization of costs and policy of ensuring that gains in productivity accrue to owners, not to workers, such a development would be disastrous.

By trying to be expedient, those laborers who are supporting the push for a higher minimum wage are accidentally making a bad situation worse.

Capitalizing on this issue though are the politicians in the state government. Both parties can now say they supported (or smear those who supported) the new law as “trying to bring recovery to Michigan” and being a friend to the people. If they were really our friends, then they would get out of our way instead piling on hundreds of regulation and licensing laws which keep us at the bottom and allow corporations to do business without threat of competition. Instead of falling prey to political pandering, we should focus on dismantling the state which keeps us from improving our lot, and create a market freed from both state and corporate rule.

This isn’t to say that I don’t understand why certain laborers would push for a higher minimum wage. Many people in minimum wage jobs are trying to support themselves and their families while also having to pay off student loans, car loans, etc. and did not ask to be put in this system in first place. However, pushing for reform is not the way to relieve the people of Michigan. Instead, let’s show every politician and boss that we don’t need them; we can find prosperity on our own.

As a working class activist, my first impulse is to support such calls, as I support anything that seems likely to help my side in the ongoing class war. However, not only will hikes in the minimum wage probably wind up hurting the people they are supposed to help, such hikes address the wrong problem anyway. The trouble isn’t that we are paid so little; it’s that the government, through a constellation of policies, makes living much more expensive than it ought to be. We are hungry in the midst of plenty, and we are stuck paying Trevelyan’s price for Trevelyan’s corn.

Workers are paid to produce, and increasing the price of employing them will do what increasing any other price does — incentivize economization and substitution, or in simpler terms, push employers to drive fewer workers harder and to replace them with machines wherever possible. Automation is coming, as it has always been coming, and the day will come when fast food restaurants find replacing fry cooks with burger bots and cashiers with pay kiosks economical. A $15/hour minimum wage will merely hasten that day, and in the meantime drive employers to demand ever more from already exhausted, minimally staffed crews.

But the inability of workers to support themselves decently, much less support their families, on the wages they are earning is a real problem, and one that has a real solution — bring down the government. As Charles Johnson documents in “Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It,” and as many of us who have lived in poverty and among the poor know first-hand, the poor are beset on all sides by a litany of state interventions that limit their options and raise their costs of living. Health care is priced out of reach by state-backed cartels; self-employment is made a distant dream by business licensing and insurance requirements; governments at every level openly state a desire to continually raise the price of housing and such increases are nigh onto universally celebrated as policy triumphs. Even food, the most basic stuff of life, has its price openly and deliberately inflated as a matter of state policy, ostensibly to protect family farmers but in reality to fatten the purse of agribusiness.

Raising the minimum wage is a short term solution that creates more problems than it solves. Doing so only hastens the replacement of workers with machines, and without addressing the basic structure of state capitalism, with its socialization of costs and policy of ensuring that gains in productivity accrue to owners, not to workers, such a development would be disastrous. Rather than frittering with the details of the system hoping to achieve social peace and general prosperity, we should smash the entire thing and build a new order in its place, an order built on free association of free individuals, an anarchic order. Rather than pleading for scraps from his table, let’s hang Trevelyan and take the corn.