Among Joe Biden’s calls for more centralized control over the lives of Americans came the incoming President’s stated intention to push for a national wage of $15 per hour. This is nothing new, of course. The “Fight for $15” first began over eight years ago, and several municipal and state governments have significantly raised their minimum wages to well over the Federal minimum of $7.25, which has remained at that level since 2009.

Many advocates of Biden’s initiative, in typical progressive fashion, frame the argument almost exclusively in moral terms: “No one who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty,” they say. Adhering to a flawed Labor Theory of Value, they insist that greedy “capitalism” is the reason why those making minimum wage aren’t compensated “fairly” by employers. They utilize oxymoronic terms like “wage slavery” to sway those who lead with their hearts and seek social justice for those who have found themselves unable to get ahead because their wages leave them living from paycheck to paycheck, at best.

The conservative response generally looks as heartless as progressives portray it. Quite often, the canned response is to blame the low-wage employees themselves for life decisions that they made that led them to the level of financial stagnation that they are experiencing. Conservative criticism of the working poor is often blaming or condescending in tone, dripping with moral judgment and disregarding the emotional crisis that such people find themselves in.

A libertarian can make a compelling case for why the best minimum wage is $0, without derision or insensitivity toward those who find themselves economically struggling in low-wage jobs. It involves conveying economic truth, while at the same time pointing the way to economic freedom.

Your wages are a price you set with an employer

As an employee, you are engaging in commerce with your employer. Whether you are a part-time menial worker without a diploma or a captain of industry, you are literally selling the end result of your time and efforts and expertise to an employer, in exchange for some agreed-upon form of compensation. That compensation may take the form of an hourly wage, or an annual salary. or a specified commission, or a contractually fixed amount, along with any other “benefits” that your employer extends as a condition of employment. You voluntarily agree to provide a service that is valuable to the employer, and the employer voluntarily agrees to provide you things that you value in return.

Therefore, for business owners, wages and salaries and benefits (along with the taxes associated with each) are prices they pay for services needed to make their businesses run more efficiently and to maximize revenue. Without paying those operating costs, meeting the demand of their customers would be more difficult (or, in many cases, even impossible).

Taking this economic reality into account, minimum wage laws are price controls.

Minimum wages are “price floors”

When the government steps in and starts setting prices, it throws the entire market out of balance. Contrary to a lot of popular opinion, prices in a free market are not arbitrarily chosen amounts set by producers; rather, they result from a host of variables, such as the scarcity of the product, demand for the product, the cost of providing the product, and alternatives in the market to that product. Ultimately, as economist F.A. Hayek indicated, prices are information, telling all parties engaging in commerce what the “value” of that product is.

Just as artificial price ceilings in order to prevent so-called ”price gouging” result in shortages of necessary goods , the minimum wage is an artificial price floor that results in a surplus of a good or service in a market — in this case, labor. Think of it in terms of other products: if the government legislated that one could not legally sell a gallon of milk for under $30, one might think that would make millionaires out of the average dairy farmer. However, very few of us would be willing to buy milk (or nearly as much milk, anyway) if we had to pay that much for every gallon. Price floors that are too high actually kill demand, resulting in an excess supply of the product in question, and eventually to a reduction in production to match.

The best case scenario for a price floor is that it has no effect at all on the demand for a good. If the government decreed that it were illegal to sell a gallon of milk less for 10¢, milk producers and consumers alike would shrug it off. Why? Because the value of a gallon of milk already exceeds that price floor. People already pay more for milk, because it is worth more than a dime a gallon for milk buyers to have it. Therefore, the price floor is meaningless and might as well not even exist.

Taking into account that wages, for employers, are prices that they pay to optimize their business, a legislated minimum wage has the same effect as any other price floor. If the cost of hiring someone full-time is so high that it becomes unprofitable (or even a net loss) for the employer, that employer is going to seek alternatives. That may take the form of reducing or eliminating non-wage benefits (which is one reason why so many low-wage jobs have shifted to part-time positions where it is not required to provide insurance benefits), hiring fewer workers and putting more responsibility on the ones who are hired, or automating the job. In cases where there is not a feasible alternative available, the business may have to cut back its unprofitable sectors or even shutter their doors completely. Whatever course of action the employer decides to take in order to avoid wages that are artificially higher than the market can sustain, the end result will be the same: a surplus of available labor on the market — also known as unemployment. Hardest-hit by this unemployment will be the ones whose low-skilled or low-specialized labor have a market value under the higher minimum wage: young people and the working poor whom the laws were intended to help in the first place. Once again, the government allegedly “helping” would instead price the labor of millions out of the market.

Obviously, human beings are not gallons of milk. We can’t simply be poured out and no longer produced when the demand for our labor is killed by artificially high minimum wages. Eventually, something has to give in order that we survive. That may take the form of a labor “black market,” in which people work and get paid “off the books,” or it may result in higher taxes to redistribute that money through government welfare programs. The latter vastly increases the numbers of those financially enslaved by the state, and it also increases resentment and enmity between those who are involuntarily funding the redistribution with higher taxes on their labor and those who are receiving the benefits without laboring, themselves.

What about those CEOs?

The progressive typically counters that this problem can be solved by marginally raising prices (“I’d pay an extra 50¢ at Taco Bell so their employees don’t starve!”) or by companies slashing the salaries of their CEOs in order that the entry-level workers can get that $15 an hour. Some even go so far as to say that a business owner that cannot pay every worker at least $15 an hour shouldn’t even be running a business in the first place.

What these people fail to take into account is that only major corporations could conceivably cover the increased costs of a $15 minimum wage by small price increases across the board and by shaving tens of millions off of executive salaries. Excessively high price floors kill off small businesses far more quickly than they do the “big box retailers,” because the owners of these businesses are not typically among the “0.1%” and actually keep themselves out of poverty with the profits from their respective endeavors. It is not out of charity that companies like Amazon are completely behind a higher national minimum wage:

Unless those progressives are suddenly in favor of the “little guys” being knocked out by the mega-corporations, their proposed solution is not a feasible one.

So, what is the solution?

The solution rests not on artificially inflating labor costs and pricing low-wage laborers out of the market, but in assisting those laborers in producing labor of a higher economic value.

The first step to that is eliminating the minimum wage entirely. Since everyone has to start somewhere, let the invisible hand of the market determine what that starting point will be. That way, there are no barriers to entry at all for those who are young and without skills or specialization.

There are a lot of libertarian approaches to helping the low-wage worker become more economically valuable. There are a number of organizations like America Works , which train people not only in specialized jobs, but educate others in the “soft skills” necessary to thrive in any work environment. There is no reason why charitable organizations like this cannot be completely funded by the voluntary contributions of individuals and companies that would benefit from the workers provided by them.

Large and small business owners alike who provide training for those interested in taking on responsibilities of greater economic value also help to solve this problem, as long as they raise the wages of employees to accurately reflect the market value of their new skills and specialization. Otherwise, they will be in danger of losing them to someone who will make them a better offer.

For those who are self-employed, providing apprenticeships in exchange for useful low-skill labor would be a way to equip someone with valuable skills while receiving some economic benefit in return.

Lastly, it is important not to overlook those who would successfully run their own businesses if they had the initial capital to do so. Finding such individuals and bootstrapping them (either through microlending or investing your money in exchange for a share of the business) might just be the kick-start that some need to produce value for others as entrepreneurs in their own right.

At the end of the day, the key to raising wages is to raise the value of the labor of those working for those wages. Government regulation does nothing but send false economic signals throughout the free market and throw everything out of balance. Ultimately, the individual worker has to make the decision on whether to take those opportunities that open up, but that the compassionate libertarian can see the potential in others and be an active part of creating more overall value in our economy by helping to liberate those who want to work toward that freedom.