A conservative Republican pushing a higher minimum wage?

In October, I talked to a liberal venture capitalist by the name of Nick Hanauer.

“The fundamental law of capitalism is, that if workers have no money, businesses have no customers,” says Hanauer.

He’s pushing a $15 minimum wage because he says, “If every worker made more, then every business would have more customers.”

It sounds pretty liberal, but there’s another ultra-rich person also pushing for a higher minimum wage.

“When you think of it, it really doesn’t make much sense for employers not to have to pay their own workers and to have the government pay the workers, if I had something like the earned income tax credit,” says Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz.

Unz is a registered Republican who plans to put a $12 minimum wage on the California ballot and he says if conservatives want to help their base, they’ll support it.

“It turns out that a rise in the minimum wage to $12, would benefit 40 percent of all southern whites, $5,000 a year, per person,” says Unz.

He also thinks $12 an hour would discourage illegal immigration by making low-wage jobs more attractive to American citizens.

If he’s right that a big jump in the minimum wage could cut government income subsidies and cut illegal immigration, then by my count, that means adopting one liberal idea would achieve two conservative goals. How weird is that?

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