Robert Cherry insists on honesty with regard to the inflationary potential of raising the minimum wage. He is right to warn against simply adopting neoclassical long run ideas for the purpose of discounting that potential, and as others have noted too, progressives needn't fall into the "inflation is an unalloyed bad" school of economics anyway. However, I think this still doesn't get to the heart of the problem, which is that minimum wage increases of the modest sort usually envisaged and implemented are only inflationary to the extent that capitalists refuse to tolerate the mild income redistribution they would otherwise imply. I.e. to the extent that inflation is a problem, it is bound up with inequality of class power. Moreover, the fact that capitalists can effectively increase prices to offset any loss of income to themselves from paying more to their minimum wage workers, raises the question of why some capitalists do not undercut their competitors by refusing to follow suit, leading to a bout of price competition whose effect would be to achieve the redistribution that increasing the minimum wage ought to accomplish. It would seem that their failure to do so reflects a failure of the normal neoclassical assumptions about competition. So either minimum wage increases are not inflationary, or there's another thing wrong with neoclassical economics. On neoclassical assumptions, there shouldn't be any inflationary effect, just a redistributive effect, brought about government intervention in the labor market. Peter [EMAIL PROTECTED]
