Skyrocketing wages would disadvantage employers and crowd-out the private sector.

Here’s why. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 39% of the workforce, some 54 million people, now earn $15 an hour or less. All would have an incentive to quit and join the federal program. Of course, most wouldn’t because their employers would, grudgingly, raise pay to keep them, then pass the cost on to customers, a de facto inflation tax. Indeed, advocates say the job guarantee accomplishes the same thing as a $15 minimum wage without the job loss. Nonetheless, potentially millions of workers would end up on the federal payroll instead of in the private sector. And there’s the rub. Utopians would argue jobs exist to give people dignity and a decent standard of living. The reality is more mundane: Jobs are how people, as producers, satisfy their needs as consumers. Low-paid work such as brewing coffee, cleaning hotel rooms and flipping hamburgers gets a bad rap but it satisfies a genuine demand: People want coffee, clean hotels and hamburgers. A federal make-work program would crowd out many of those private services. Crowding out is fine when the government is providing something more valuable, Roger Farmer and Dmitry Plotnikov, economists at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote in 2010. For example, military spending crowded out private consumption during World War II, when the U.S. “was fighting for its survival.” In ordinary times, that is a harder case to make. A 2011 study by ​Lauren Cohen,​ Joshua Coval​ and Christopher Malloy of Harvard Business School found that when a member of Congress takes over an important committee, his state often enjoys an influx of federal spending. But that benefit is offset by a contraction in private investment and employment, evidence of crowding out.