Use and nonuse of the phrase 'Living Wage'

Story:
Lakoff has explained that negating a frame only reinforces it. I recently saw a very strong example of this.

I'm a faculty member advocating the instituting of a living wage at my university. We feel that every employee -- even the lowliest janitor -- deserves to have a salary high enough so that he or she can live on it without taking government assistance or a second job. We're making progress in this campaign -- the employees recently won a good-sized raise -- but we still have a ways to go.

The phrase "living wage" summarizes our goal, and that phrase is also our best tool. We hope to publicize that phrase, to get it into the minds of the local community. Once one accepts the validity of that phrase and its meaning, one can hardly argue against our campaign. Essentially, using that phrase enforces our frame.

The university's administrators recognize the power of that phrase, and have carefully avoided ever using it in any of their public statements. To deny their employees a living wage would be unacceptably callous and cruel.

But some conservative students have not been so wise. We have several student newspapers on campus, and in the current issue of the conservative paper, "Living Wage Never" is the headline of the main story. I burst out laughing when I saw that headline; I could see that negating the frame does not disarm it.

Starting from conservatives' basic assumptions about economics, the article explains in great detail why the university should not grant a living wage. But the conclusion -- that we should cruelly deny employees a living wage -- is untenable. So all the article succeeds in proving is that conservatives' basic assumptions are flawed, and that conservatives are too obsessed with their abstract theories to see the evidence against those theories, and ultimately that conservatives are heartless and stupid.

I just wonder how we can get the conservative students to keep attacking us.