People who invoke my name against the minimum wage have often not read me carefully. I did write that when masters and workmen dispute over wages, the masters can combine quietly and at length, while the workmen's combinations are loud, short, and usually broken by the law. The legal and social deck was stacked against the laborer in my own time, and I said so plainly. My objection was never to wages being high — I argued explicitly that high wages were a symptom of a growing, healthy economy, not a drag on it. My objection was to any party — employer guild or legislative body — rigging the labor market to extract more than a competitive exchange would yield.

So the honest question is not "floor or no floor" in the abstract. It is: what is the institutional condition of the labor market in question? Where workers can move freely between employers, where information about wages is public, and where no single buyer of labor dominates a town or a sector, the market itself will tend to push wages toward their natural rate. In that setting, a legislated floor set above the market rate does harm — it prices some workers out, exactly as it prices any good out when you set its minimum above what buyers will pay. That mechanism is real and I would not pretend otherwise.

But that clean competitive picture is not always the world as it exists. A single large employer in a small town, or an industry whose workers face high costs of relocation and retraining, is not a competitive market — it is closer to what I called a monopoly, in this case a monopoly over the buying of labor rather than the selling of a good. Economists after my time would call this monopsony, and the logic holds: a buyer with market power will pay less than the competitive wage, just as a seller with market power charges more than the competitive price. In that setting, a minimum wage does not price workers out — it corrects a pre-existing distortion. The floor is disciplining the monopolist, not overriding a free market.

My deeper concern, then, is institutional. The minimum wage is a blunt instrument where a sharper one — robust enforcement of labor mobility, public investment in education and retraining, vigorous prosecution of employer collusion — would do more lasting good. I argued that the sovereign owes the common people instruction, and I meant it: a workforce with portable skills is a workforce with bargaining power, which is worth more than any fixed floor. Set the floor if the alternative is exploitation by a dominant employer; but do not mistake the floor for a substitute for the competitive framework that makes the floor unnecessary in the first place. The goal is a labor market honest enough that workers and employers meet as genuine counterparties — and building that framework is the public's business.