Great news for jobless teenagers: It turns out the jobs they don't have aren't really jobs. What a relief!  They're not unemployed. They're just not employed.

This contribution to the debate on the minimum wage and its effect on unemployment comes from Terrance Hunsley, executive director of the Canadian Council on Social Development, who is pushing for a 25% increase in the minimum wage to help alleviate poverty. It illustrates a lot of what's wrong with our thinking on the proper role of state and market in matters of social equity.

The minimum wage is one of those issues on which economists, contrary to their bickering image, are much in agreement: they don't like it. That they are so unanimous may be because they happen to know a lot about it - unlike, say, macroeconomic policy. Which is why politicians and the public listen respectfully when economists ramble on about demand management, but ignore their explicit advice on the minimum wage: abolish it.

So Hunsley's first reply when the point is made that pegging wages above market levels must necessarily create an imbalance between the supply and demand for labor - sometimes called ''unemployment'' - is that this is a ''standard economic argument,'' and thus may be disregarded.

This must not have seemed a wholly satisfying rebuttal, however, for Hunsley goes on to play his trump card: the jobs the minimum wage destroys, chiefly for those lacking skills or experience, should not properly be called jobs. They are rather ''exploitation.'' The person who holds such a job is not employed; he is ''being exploited.'' The minimum wage, through the miracle of unemployment, averts such tragedies.

INCREASES UNEMPLOYMENT

The persistence of support for the minimum wage in the face of all evidence - studies for the the Macdonald Commission show that every 10% increase in the minimum wage adds another percentage point to teenage unemployment - reflects a confusion of means and ends. It is not the wage itself one wishes to set a floor under, but the income such a wage makes possible.

Modern liberals recognize that a minimum wage little benefits those not earning a wage in the first place. The way to assure everyone a minimum income is to supplement the income of the working poor through the tax-and-transfer system.

Paleoliberals like Hunsley worry over the loss of ''independence and pride'' in this ''work for welfare.'' In its place they would offer that proud independent alternative, welfare without work.

There's no doubt the minimum wage does help those who have jobs, and the unemployed always have the hope, while they wait, that their number will eventually come up. That's more or less Hunsley's point.

The same argument in different form was once made to me by Havi Echenberg of the National Anti-Poverty Organization, who explained that the organization had decided to support groups like the postal workers, even though the high wages they enjoy thanks to the postal monopoly push up stamp prices, because the poor might aspire to these jobs one day.

Hmmmm. Regressive policies that benefit those in higher-paying jobs at the expense of the poor and the unemployed should be accepted on the grounds that eventually everyone will share in the benefits. What does this sound like? Trickle- down.

The problem with the minimum wage as with every other attempt to achieve distributive ends through the market - rent controls, farm price supports, equal pay for work of equal value, and so on - is not, as conservatives believe, Big Government. It's phony Small Government. It is an attempt to fool ourselves into believing the state is not intervening when it really is.

Governments should be big enough to admit they're big. Where governments intervene, they should be brazen. They should openly take from one group and give to another. Their actions should be forceful, admitting no possibility of evasion. They should tax, not borrow. And, as the saying goes, they should redistribute market results, not distort market processes.

The market is incapable of producing a distribution of income that society finds to its liking, except by accident. That doesn't change just because you fiddle a price here and there. Indeed, it's likely to make matters worse, since the tendency of economic distortions is to exclude the poor from the benefits, and shift onto them the costs.

Let the market do what it can do. But render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.