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The Archetype Of A Liberal?Conservative Debate

An old liberal friend visited my wife and me over the past weekend. Because he believes, for example, that Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer are rather moderate centrists and other fictions we generally avoided talking politics, but we did risk one conversation on Obamacare that quickly became a rather brisk and unpleasant debate.

Afterwards I realized that the form, the essence, of that debate is at the core of many such discussions, so common as to be a virtual archetype. It can be reduced and captured, I think, in the following purely fictional exchange, which I have transferred to a counter-factual, imaginary topical terrain just to make the point:

Friend: ?Millions of workers are greatly underpaid. Not only does their plight cause them unhappiness and cause society the great expense of welfare support etc.; it also deprives society of the benefits that would flow to the general welfare if they had higher wages that would allow them to consume more. We should pass a minimum wage law of $37 an hour.?

Me: ?Perhaps a minimum wage law is a good idea, but a minimum set that high would lead employers to fire millions of workers and would cause employers to raise their price of their goods and services by drastic amounts.?

Friend: ?The president, relying on the very best economists from the very best schools and quoting the very best columnists from the very best newspapers, has promised that a guaranteed minimum wage of $37 an hour would cause no workers to lose their jobs and would not cause any increase in the price of goods and services. The only people who disagree have been misled by the tea party fanatics of talk radio.?

Me: ?But you simply can?t raise the price of labor by that much without either forcing employers to fire workers they can no longer afford or raising their prices to cover their new costs, or both.?

Friend: ?But millions of workers are greatly underpaid, and so we must guarantee them $37 an hour.?

This, of course, was not the actual conversation we had. But, sadly, it is not so different, and certainly not as different as a sane political discourse would require.

Full post as published by Discriminations on October 05, 2010 (boomark / email).