(FORTUNE Magazine) – Hey, fellows, guess what? Your correspondent is about to come down on the same side as the New York Times on a burning issue. Amazing, eh? And yet no more flabbergasting than the semi-unprecedented policy split between the Times and the Washington Post over this selfsame issue, which is the minimum wage. The Times is sensibly saying that it would be crazy to raise the minimum, as the Congresspersons are now threatening to do, while our country's other official organ of establishment liberalism is hortatorily proclaiming: ''Let's Restore the Minimum Wage.'' That means the Post supports the bill to jack up the federal minimum to $3.85 an hour next year (from the present $3.35) and to $4.65 by 1991. The bill is expected to pass both houses this spring and possibly attract enough unsound thinkers to override a veto. We would have thought the Post knew better. The case for the minimum wage is exactly the same as the case for the free lunch. It is represented to be an essentially costless benefit: Low-paid workers will get paid more, but the bosses will smilingly persist in employing just as many workers as ever. If you know a guy who is thinking of putting his family's last $100,000 into a dry-cleaning store on the corner and is oblivious to boosts in his labor costs, then you are on the same astral plane as Teddy Kennedy (sponsor of the Senate bill). Every economist worth his salt knows that elevating the minimum wage decreases job opportunities. The Post editorial nervously sidles up to this reality as follows: ''It is probably true that some marginal jobs will probably be lost.'' This barrage of conditionalism leaves the Post about where the unions are. The laborites always argue that the minimum wage couldn't possibly be creating much or any unemployment because, they lengthily testify, past increases in the minimum have generally been followed by employment gains. The formulation of AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland: ''The record shows that each time the minimum wage was increased since World War II, employment has gone up, with the single exception of the 1975 recession.'' But the record Kirkland cites is irrelevant to the contention on the table. Nobody is saying that a higher minimum will totally terminate economic expansion in the country. Most industries, after all, have pay scales that leave them largely unaffected by the minimum wage. The question is whether a higher minimum reduces employment in the industries that are affected. The answer is just what you would expect it to be. Labor Department economists state that a 40% increase in the minimum wage (what the bill provides) would be expected to reduce employment by 400,000 to 800,000. A study prepared by Robert R. Nathan Associates zeroed in on the retailing industry and showed that in 1978-81 (the last period in which the minimum was rising), total retailing jobs were around 250,000 lower than they otherwise would have been; the study also showed that the rate of job creation in the industry has increased since 1981. The wobbliest part of the Post's argument concerns the beneficiaries of minimum wagism. Everybody agrees that non-laid-off minimum-wage workers benefit from a rise. The Post, like every solon supporting the bill, suggests ! that these beneficiaries are mostly the poor -- ''the weakest among us,'' in the paper's smarmy phrase. In fact, minimum-wage workers tend overwhelmingly to be women and kids who are not breadwinners and come from middle-class families. The Nathan analysis notes that 20% of the affected families would actually have incomes over $50,000. One senses that they will accept the raises anyway.