It is hard to believe that it is happening under a Republican-controlled Congress and White House, but a measure to put federal bureaucrats in charge of wage setting for a big chunk of the American economy appears headed toward passage. The measure is one of the obscure provisions contained in the 600-plus page Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act in the Senate.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is the main Senate sponsor of the provision that was adopted by the Senate earlier this week on a voice vote. Obama credited Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., for assisting him with this provision.

We also wonder how many of Sen. Arlen Specter’s Republican colleagues would have voted for the Obama amendment if the senior Pennsylvania legislator had not moved for the voice vote. It is not hard to imagine the amendment failing if it had been put to a recorded vote because few Republicans would vote publicly for such a measure. Here again is illustrated the immense damage done when a Republican majority includes so many “Republicans-in-Name-Only” like Specter. Such RINOs seem far more suited to working with Democrats like Obama, Bingaman and Feinstein.

What the provision does, according to Obama, is “establish a true prevailing wage for all occupations.” Ponder those words carefully because they are the top edge of a slippery slope downward to the chaos, confusion, injustice and economic stagnation that thousands of years of human history show always result when government tries to set wages.

This story continues below
Advertisement

The bill establishes a new bureaucracy within the U.S. Department of Labor that would be tasked with determining which occupations in the U.S. have labor shortages that can be filled by immigrants via the Guest Worker program. A panel of 10 politically appointed bureaucrats would then fix wages within those designated occupations by applying Davis-Bacon’s onerous “prevailing wage” requirements on employers.

This bureaucratic scheme would only cover about 5 percent of the U.S. economy at the outset, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Dr. Tim Kane, whose recent Web memo exposed the Obama amendment. But 5 percent today will inevitably expand as special interest groups lobby the Labor Department and friendly congressmen for favorable rulings. Soon presidential candidates will also compete in finding new ways to manipulate wages to satisfy political demands.

If nothing else was learned by the 20th-century’s murderous experiments with centrally planned bureaucratic economies, it is that faceless bureaucrats in a far-distant capitol are no more qualified to set wages for unskilled workers than they are for winning the war on poverty, eliminating hunger in our lifetimes or designing the 80 miles per gallon pollution-free family car.

Apparently the GOP majority in Washington missed the memo.