Chicago, the birthplace of Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Wards, Marshall Fields, and a host of other retail department or “Big Box” stores is considering a law whose effect would be to put a great big sign up at the city limits disinviting big retailers from doing any more business in “The City That Works.”

The law – currently backed by 33 of the 50 members of the Moscow…er, Chicago City Council – would require stores that have at least 75,000 square feet and $1 Billion in annual sales to pay employees $10 per hour plus $3 an hour in benefits.

“This is an effort to try to preserve the middle class,” said Joe Moore, an alderman from the North Side who sponsored the measure. Mr. Moore called the notion that it would drive retailers out of the city “hogwash.”

Mr. Moore is probably correct. The idea that retailers, already doing business in Chicago as a result of the sweetheart deals that lured them here, would leave is wrong. But what retailer in their right mind would open another store in Chicago, having to pay their employees approximately $3 per hour more in hourly wages plus another $3 an hour in mandated benefits than they would have to pay a couple of miles down the road?

David Vite, president and chief executive of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, tried to inject some sanity into the discussion:

[H]e thought the state would block such an ordinance and that it seemed unconstitutional because it would discriminate against some businesses. “To suggest that someone who is a janitor in a retail store should get paid more than a janitor at a bank doesn’t make any sense,” Mr. Vite said.

C’mon, David! This is the Chicago City Council we’re talking about here! Who said “making sense” had something to do with anything that august, albeit laughably corrupt body has ever done. Especially since the originators of this entire cockamamie scheme – lawyers for something called The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law – see nothing wrong with imposing a little economic Sharia law on high profile businesses who have already received enormous tax breaks and other goodies from this same City Council for opening stores in the first place.

But Jennifer Sung, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which helped draft the proposal, said the measure would withstand challenges.

Ms. Sung said courts had ruled that distinctions could be made among industries if there was a rational basis for doing so. She also said that Illinois had granted local governments broad powers to pass regulations to promote a city’s health and welfare.

Similar legislation has been introduced in Washington, D.C., and discussed in New Jersey. Lawmakers in Maryland; Suffolk County, N.Y.; and New York City have passed laws requiring certain large employers to provide health care benefits for workers, but none of those laws have a wage component.

It’s no secret that in order to get most of these big box retailers to build and open their doors in many areas of the city, the City Council granted generous tax breaks and other sweeteners like infrastructure improvements, all so that the thousands of jobs created by these employers could be filled by city residents. How would it look if Wal-Mart up and abandoned the city as a result of being told how much it has to pay its employees?

“Don’t let me be the experiment,” said Emma Mitts, the alderwoman in the poor and mainly African-American neighborhood of Austin on the West Side, where the city’s first Wal-Mart is scheduled to open this year. “Not at a time when my community needs these jobs so badly.”

Wal-Mart has apparently assured the city that it plans to go ahead with the store opening regardless of what the wage situation might be.

But the shortsightedness of this proposal can be found not only in how it will affect the future of business development in Chicago, but in how it will affect the buying habits of the big retailers who already are purchasing most of their inventories from other countries. Wages are one of the only costs a retailer can control. By taking that decision out of the company’s hands and placing it in a governmental body, you force the retailer to cut costs elsewhere in order to maintain the razor thin profit margin at the store level that allows it to remain open. And where you cut those costs is in inventory – cheaper and less of it. Cheaper inventory usually means cutting off American suppliers and buying overseas thus resulting in a further erosion of our industrial base.

The debate over a “working wage” and a “living wage” will eventually be settled in favor of the worker as these things usually are in America. The question will be after that happens is how many jobs there will be to fill those “living wage” positions? Unless there is a concurrent requirement that company’s maintain the size of their work force as well as paying a “living wage,” there will be nothing to prevent employers from simply reducing their work force in order to maintain profitability.

The result – fewer jobs, a further deterioration in customer service at these stores, and the continued decline of the “Made in America” brand.

But hey! If it “preserves the middle class” (or what’s left of it), why not go for it?