It's Wednesday, December 11, 2024. I'm Albert Mowler, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. One of the most controversial issues in American public life, at least from time to time and place to place, is the minimum wage. And there are some

separate questions. Should there be a minimum wage? And if so, what should that wage be?

Now, the first question has been answered in the United States since 1938. When in the aftermath,

and to some degree, in the midst of the effects of the Great Depression, the U.S. government put in place

a minimum wage, which, by the way, was about 25 cents an hour. It covered a good bit of the

workforce, and it came down to a minimum hourly wage that could be paid that would justify

a position in which an employer could undertake to employ an employee and pay

by a wage hour, and that would turn out to be at least 25 cents an hour. Now, we can understand

why the argument for a minimum wage was put into place. For one thing, you had the horrors of

the Great Depression, you had people standing in breadlines,

you had people suffering very high unemployment, and you also had the accusation that there was income, inequality, and under-employment. That is to say, you had employers taking the

labor of those who were their workers without adequate compensation or adequate wage.

And so in the name of

writing that wrong, of correcting that injustice, Congress put into place in the 1930s, and of course

this was also a part of the general political momentum of the age that would turn into Roosevelt's

New Deal. They put in this vast expansion of federal authority in order to create a

federal minimum wage. And it has been in place now, as I say, since 1938. The question as to whether

or not there will be a minimum wage, at least in historic terms, has been answered ever since

that 1938 date. But the second question keeps coming up again and again and again. If we do have a

minimum wage, and we'll talk about the morality and the worldview of that question in just a moment,

if you do have a minimum wage, what should that wage be at any given time? Ever since the year 2009,

the minimum hourly wage in the United States has been set at $7.25.

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