There's something about the economic arguments regularly presented by the reigning conservative clique that I don't understand. I have puzzled and puzzled, as the late Dr. Seuss famously put it, till my puzzler is sore. Maybe one of my clever readers can enlighten me.

I was reminded of this puzzle once again this week as congressional Democrats — with reason, compassion and common sense on their side, I thought — declared they would block yet another pay raise for themselves until America's lowest-paid workers also got a raise.

How many of you, reading these words, have recently tried to live on $5.15 an hour? Get out your calculators: That's $206 a week gross, people, or $892.66 a month, and you can be pretty sure that that does not include health insurance.

The minimum wage has been sitting at this insulting figure since 1997, when a 40-cent-an-hour increase brought it to its present level. As Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy pointed out Thursday, during the intervening years Congress has voted itself eight pay raises totaling $31,000 a year, for a 24 percent increase over nine years.

It seems only reasonable, doesn't it?

No, no, no, screams economist Chris Edwards of the conservative Cato Institute. Jack up the minimum wage and employers will not be able to afford to hire low-wage workers any more. They would be "priced out of the workforce," he told Cybercast News Service.

Meanwhile, in one year, according to the Washington Post, the median pay for the D.C. area's top executives at public companies rose by 21.2 percent. The average pay for a CEO of one of the Standard & Poor's top 100 companies rose by 3.66 percent to an average of $11.75 million.

So here's my question: When do these guys price themselves out of the market?

Why is it that every time a rise in the minimum wage is suggested, conservative-leaning economists screech that it's unaffordable, but they make no noise at all when the CEOs' pay busts the charts?

No, no, don't talk to me about the free market. Plenty of studies have shown that CEOs of very troubled companies still rake in the cash and the perks. The free market doesn't determine their salaries; compensation committees, made up of their buddies, do that. OK, maybe not their buddies — just alumni of the same prep school. Or members of the same college fraternity.

OK, I understand — Teddy Kennedy isn't actually an outsider in the world of the privileged. But this is where, shopworn and dog-eared as it is, the Democratic Party still has a role to play. It's the place where, even if you're rich, you cling to some notion that government is there to do more than clear the way for your class to make more money. You understand that you would never be where you are if it weren't for American workers. You have some sense of fairness.

The Democratic Party has stumbled badly in recent years, seeming to lose its sense of mission and its confidence that government need not be a dirty word. But now maybe — just maybe — the Democrats are finding their voice again.

This is a conservative country. Republicans know this and have exploited the knowledge over the past decade. Befuddled Democrats, rattled by the Clinton meltdown and scared of seeming soft on terror, have handed them many victories.

But the wheel keeps turning. This is not, at heart, a mean country. Americans do believe in fairness — sort of. When the playing field starts to look too crazily tilted, we get restless. Congressional Democrats sense that.

Not all these people are Kennedys, for whom the congressional salary is an afterthought. For some, it really is their take-home pay — and $165,200 scarcely puts them among the plutocracy. Many school system superintendents make more.

To be willing to turn down their own pay raise until those at the bottom get what's long overdue — it's brilliant. And it's right.

Now they just need to find an economist who can answer my question.

Susanna Rodell is editorial-page editor of The Charleston Gazette. Reach her at surodell@aol.com.