The Economics of $50 Lettuce

John McCain has famously said that “the issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should” and in addition to being rather offensive, his “you can’t do it” rant about the problem with paying people $50 an hour to pick lettuce is a reminder of that:

What you can see happening here is that McCain knows which position he’s supposed to argue for — namely that it’s desirable that we allow relatively high levels of immigration to, among other things, do menial agricultural work. His antagonist says Americans would do these jobs if the jobs paid more. Rather than concede the obvious — for enough money you’d certainly be able to find someone to do just about everything — McCain argues that native born Americans are actually incapable of picking lettuce in exchange for any sum of money. “You can’t do it, my friends.”

Bad arguments in defense of bad positions are one thing, but there’s actually a very obvious problem with the idea of $50 an hour lettuce pickers, namely that lettuce would be extremely expensive if the pickers earned that much money. And broadly speaking there are many more Americans who eat food (i.e., all of us) than there are Americans who work on farms, so avoiding super-expensive agricultural wage rates generally works out well for us. One could, of course, mount some plausible counters to that position and the debate could rage on in an informed manner. But McCain — even though he was, at the time, at the center of the immigration debate as one of the main co-authors of a compromise he later disavowed while still wanted to get credit for bipartisanship for having been involved — doesn’t seem to understand the issue at all.