In fact, the op-ed even causes me to feel sorry for the people at mainstream newspapers who decide which op-eds to publish in their papers.

The op-ed in question is written by a Duke University student named Caroline Petrow-Cohen, who is a summer intern at the Times. Her piece takes California Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder to task for favoring a repeal of the minimum wage. As Elder succinctly puts it, "The ideal minimum wage is $0."

That idea horrifies Petro-Cohen. She is convinced that if the minimum wage were repealed, workers everywhere would immediately be relegated to subsistence wages. That's because, she says, businesses always have more leverage than workers. Without a government-mandated wage floor, all those rapacious business owners, whose only goal is to make a profit, would immediately drop their wages to a few dollars per hour or worse.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Petro-Cohen fails to address a rather obvious question, one that is contrary to her thesis. The question is this: Why do many businesses pay their workers more than what the minimum wage requires them to pay?

After all, if Petro-Cohen's thesis is correct, that should not be happening. Under her reasoning, every business would pay no more than what the government is requiring. If the minimum wage, say, is $10 an hour, then no business would be paying more than $10 an hour. 

Yet, that simply isn't reality. We know, as a fact, that many businesses pay their workers more than what the law requires them to pay with the minimum wage. What's up with that? Why doesn't Petro-Cohen take the time to address that phenomenon? Why didn't the editors at the LA Times ask her to address that point in her article?