September 30, 2006
Gordon’s Persiflage Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:15 AM EST John Steele Gordon assumes the point at issue, about the minimum wage, and engages in some intriguingly dated mockery. On the style of mockery and its history (this is a history blog, after all): After simply repeating his assertion that the minimum wage can only hurt the poor, Mr. Gordon then notes, “But liberals, munching a nice ripe Brie in their Upper West Side apartments, and washing it down with a naive little Pinot Grigio of no breeding but much presumption, will feel all warm and fuzzy anyway.” Aficionados of rightist polemical cliché may recall the polemical phrase “the brie and Chablis set,” which has been dragged wearily along by faux-populist would-be demagogues since at least the 1970s. Mr. Gordon has ingeniously updated the despised French white to an Italian made from a mutant clone of Pinot Noir (a Chablis is made from Chardonnay grapes), although the despised Brie remains, if in several senses riper than was originally the case. Why this labored sneering at Brie and white wine? Probably because white wine and runny cheese seemed the cynosure of bicoastal middle-class pseudosophistication back during the Ford Administration, when better Americans were apparently imagined to be still knocking back boilermakers while snacking on pigs in a blanket, and when cheese passed their lips it was presumably cheddar. I am mildly amused by this depiction of Pinot Grigio as the tipple of effete snobs, because the first person I knew who drank the stuff was my father, an extremely unpretentious man who was introduced to it by an allegedly mob-connected restaurant owner in the garment center, where it was otherwise consumed by ominous-looking older gentlemen at whom everyone was careful not to stare. But note what is being attempted by this labored faux-populism. A man who insists that he is looking out for the common man, from a perch somewhere north of the city (apparently a more plebeian precinct than the Upper West Side), is affecting to protect Joe six-pack, or the kid who wants a job in a bodega, from furrin-swilling snotties, by demanding that no cheese-eating, wine-sipping Europhile try to raise the common man’s minimum wage. Lest this solicitude be misunderstood, Mr. Gordon claims a solidarity of taste with Joe six-pack: no Brie and Pinot Grigio for real Americans. What about that breeding and presumption business? It is surely intended to imply that liberals are snobs, people who think they are better than the common man, and are destructively playing Lady Bountiful. That part of the joke, alas, is not wholly original. It dates from 1944, when “Only a native domestic Burgundy, but I think you'll admire its presumption” was the caption to a Thurber cartoon. But Thurber, had he for some reason disliked the minimum wage, would not have over-politicized his joke, and for good reason: The 1940s were not a time when people who wanted to abolish the minimum wage were readily mistaken for friends of the common man. This whole business is a now-familiar tactic by the American right, the substitution of culturalist pseudoargument for rational economic argument: I am one of you, he is one of them, I must have your economic interests at heart, and he cannot, how could he even understand you? He eats Brie! When there is a trace of economic argument, it is argument by assertion, which is to say, assuming the point at issue. Mr. Gordon engages in a long burst of petitio principii, a fallacy also known as begging the question. He simply asserts that the minimum wage “hurts those people who lose their jobs as a result of a minimum-wage increase.” But we do not know whether people nowadays lose their jobs as a result of a minimum-wage increase; that is what we are attempting to discover. I provided links to a study by some very reputable economists suggesting that this does not occur. I provided a link to a study by some less well-known economists suggesting the same thing. I provided a link to a study showing that economists are less persuaded of what Mr. Gordon insists on than was once the case. I do not claim that these studies must be right, but they are worth thinking about. But in this case, thinking is not what Mr. Gordon is doing. He is engaging in rhetoric, and not particularly edifying or original rhetoric. Remember, this is a contested question. There is no indisputable evidence that Americans are losing their jobs because of increases in the minimum wage. The assumption that the minimum wage has perverse effects is what the empirical work, done by rather celebrated economists, has called into question. As for my suggestion that raising the minimum wage is now a much likelier prospect than an attempt to institute politically less-probable earned income tax credits, Mr. Gordon replies that “this is simply an argument to maintain the status quo.” No, it is an attempt to raise the minimum wage, the value of which has eroded quite remarkably since my boyhood, and which has not been raised in a decade. As for Mr. Gordon’s assertion—his mere assertion—that “anyone capable of holding a job is capable of filing a form”—he might want to look at the evidence on the effects of functional illiteracy, which is a real factor in the lives of the poorest of the working poor.
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