Celebrity chef Paula Deen cooks up delicious dishes, but they tend towards the unhealthy — high calorie, high fat, and high salt. So if I were writing a book on nutritious eating, I probably wouldn’t be seeking her endorsement. We are, after all, judged by the company we keep.
Similarly, if I were advocating for boosting the minimum wage, I wouldn’t list as a supporter someone who bills herself as a “Marxist-feminist-anti-racist-ecological-economist.” That label doesn’t help make my case. Indeed, it undermines it.
The part that undermines it is “Marxist.” The economist in question, Wellesley College professor Julie Ann Matthaei, was one of more than 600 featured in a pro-minimum wage petition pushed by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The right-leaning Employment Policies Institute in turn attacked that petition, notably cherry-picking out Matthaei and few others for condemnation.
Righteous liberals are appalled, arguing that merely because a Marxist lends support doesn’t make illegitimate the case for increasing the minimum wage and, further, that attacks on Matthaei are unfair, amounting to some sort of modern-day red-baiting. They’re partially correct on the former and wrong on the latter.
If Deen did endorse my book on nutrition, that wouldn’t necessarily mean my advice was invalid. But it would subject me to a few raised eyebrows, some well-deserved mockery, and legitimate questions about whether I really knew my subject.
In Matthaei’s case, it’s worse. The principal arguments against the minimum wage are that it hurts economic growth and kills jobs. That’s the theory, and at some point, clearly, it’s true. If we suddenly increased the minimum from $7.25 to, say, $100, I guarantee we’d quickly see a horrific combination of high inflation and deep recession. But at the level being proposed by the Obama administration — a modest jump to $10.10 — there’s a good amount of empirical data that the negative effects would not be significant.
There’s room for legitimate disagreement on that, however. For example, the Congressional Budget Office in February predicted 500,000 jobs might be lost. Still, all of that comes in the context of folks debating the effects of a policy change on the US’s mixed-market, capitalist economy.
On the other hand, if your ideology is such that you favor the dismantling of that type of economy, then it seems at least fair that people might question the validity of your analysis and might wonder further whether there’s a hidden agenda at play: wage controls as the first step in eliminating free markets. Having Matthaei arguing for increasing the minimum wage doesn’t make everyone else wrong, but it sure doesn’t help.
More puzzling, however, is the dismissal of attacks on Matthaei as red-baiting, a claim the professor herself has raised. No question, red-baiting has an ignominious history, with dissenters often unjustly attacked for being Marxists and communists. Still, Matthaei doesn’t shy away from calling herself a Marxist, and it’s hard to understand why it’s wrong to point that out.
Actually, I do understand why. Marxism and its political system, communism, have been so thoroughly discredited that to denounce someone these days as Marxist seems overwrought and mean-spirited, kind of like piling up the score at a ballgame.
But once we worried about Marxists a great deal, and for good reason. They’ve been a source of misery for millions.
The Soviet Union, the world’s best-developed example of a communist state, survived for the time it did only through a toxic mix of repression, dictatorship, and mass murder. On top of that, communism proved laughably ineffective as an economic system. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, it wasn’t terror and totalitarianism that did it in; it was impoverishment.
Nor do many envy life in the five remaining communist states — China (arguably no longer Marxist), Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. Could there possibly be a humane form of communism? I’m with philosopher Bertrand Russell on this one: “The theoretical tenets of communism are false, and . . . its practical maxims are such as to produce an immeasurable increase of human misery.”
Granted, in today’s world concerns about communists in our midst can be readily dismissed. Except for obscure nooks and crannies of academia, few would advocate such a change. But the fears were once quite real. We forget too quickly, I think.
This column originally appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on March 16, 2014.