Pennsylvania and Virginia recently passed legislation to increase their minimum wage to $15 per hour, closing the gap with Oregon ($15.55 as of July 1) and California ($17.90 in some places). In all, 34 states mandate a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. The potential economic detriments of a minimum wage — namely, job losses — are well known. But the trend toward higher and higher minimum wages ought to prompt us to reconsider their purpose. 

The standard assumption about progressivism is that it's intrinsically good — after all, who would oppose progress? Progressivism in the twentieth-century, though, had a much more squirrely history. Many progressives were proponents of eugenics, opponents of classical liberalism, and advocates of scientific racism. And the origins of the federal minimum wage emerged from these attitudes.

Compared to today's progressives, early twentieth-century progressive economists were at least honest and understood the impact of a minimum wage — they knew that it would cause job losses. But they believed the job losses caused by the minimum wage were a social benefit, not a detriment. 

As the historian Thomas Leonard summarized it:

Sidney and Beatrice Webb put it plainly: 'With regard to certain sections of the population [the 'unemployable'], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.'

'[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,' Sidney Webb opined in the Journal of Political Economy, 'the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.'  … A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants and also by removing from employment the 'unemployable,' who, thus identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized.

In other words, for progressives, race determined the standard of living and the standard of living determined the wage. Edward Ross, the American sociologist and progressive, put it more bluntly: "owing to its high Malthusian birth rate the Orient is the land of 'cheap men,' the coolie, though he cannot outdo the American, can underlive him." Woodrow Wilson, echoing the same sentiment, said that Chinese immigrants could "live upon a handful of rice for a pittance."