Among the hotly contested list of Joe Biden’s promises is an increase of the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. There are plenty of sound reasons to oppose government minimum wage laws, but there is one objection making the rounds that is based on bad economics and should be avoided, and that’s the "businesses will pass on the costs to consumers" objection.

A belief still commonly held today by not just Marxists and socialists, but progressives of many stripes, is the insistence that employers are “stealing” part of their workers’ labor because the wage workers receive from their employer are less than the contribution of their labor to the final value (i.e., selling price) of the finished good.

That’s a question USA Today posed to three “policy experts on the left and the right” in this recent article. The responses, while unsurprising, were nevertheless disappointing. For libertarians, economic inequality itself is not problematic, as long as it is in the context of an unfettered market economy free of government privileges and interference.

The covid-19 lockdowns have done untold amounts of economic damage, most of which has yet to reveal itself. Permanent unemployment for millions, countless bankruptcies, rent defaults and much more will jar the economy for the foreseeable future.