The Conservative Argument For Raising The Minimum Wage

Ron Unz made his fortune in Silicon Valley and his political reputation by essentially eliminating bilingual education in California. He's now pushing for a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage in the state to $12 an hour, the highest in the nation.

Unz told Here & Now's Meghna Chakrabarti that he got involved in the minimum wage issue because of the immigration issue.

"One of the arguments frequently made is that a lot of the immigrants who come here take the jobs that Americans don't want, and that's perfectly true," he said. "In a lot of these jobs, if the wages were reasonable, Americans would take the work, and then there wouldn't be as much of a problem."

Raising the minimum wage would also take the burden off taxpayers to subsidize the working poor, Unz says.

"The bottom line is that the American government right now spends $250 billion a year on social welfare programs to benefit the working poor," he said. "What we have right now is the classic case of businesses privatizing the benefits of the workers, but socializing the costs — shifting the burden to taxpayers and the rest of society. And I think businesses should stand on their own two feet and pay their own workers, rather than force the taxpayers to make up the difference."