The minimum wage — a government-mandated minimum amount that employers must pay employees — has been part of the American political landscape for roughly a century. In 1912, the state of Massachusetts became the first to take action to establish a minimum wage at the state level, and within a decade, many more states had followed suit.

It was not until the Great Depression that the first attempt was made to establish a federal minimum wage. In 1933, the Roosevelt administration made $.25 per hour the national minimum wage as part of the National Recovery Act, the centerpiece legislation of the New Deal. Only two years later, however, the Supreme Court ruled the national minimum wage unconstitutional. Undeterred, Roosevelt reinstated the $.25 minimum wage in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and this time, a more pliant Supreme Court discovered constitutional authority for a federal minimum wage in the oft-abused interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. Accordingly, the minimum wage became the law of the land, and has remained so ever since.

Quite aside from the question of whether a federal minimum wage is constitutional (it is not), it is worth asking whether any government-mandated minimum wage is good policy. Most American voters now assume that government ought to set some type of minimum wage in order to prevent employers from exploiting their workers; they quibble only on what that level should be. In 2006 alone, for example, voters in six states approved state-level minimum wage hikes. Nowadays, there are 29 states with minimum wages higher than that mandated by federal law. But despite a broad popular consensus on the need for minimum wages, is it in fact good policy?

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