Despite plenty of evidence that the minimum wage does not produce the benefits its supporters claim for it, politicians turn to the idea again and again.
Perhaps Jonah Goldberg’s description in Liberal Fascism of the history of the minimum wage will prompt new thought about this economically unsound policy:
Consider the debate over the minimum wage. The controversy centered on what to do about what Sidney Webb called the “unemployable class.” It was Webb’s belief, shared by many of the progressive economists affiliated with the American Economic Association, that establishing a minimum wage above the value of the unemployables’ worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class. This is essentially the modern conservative argument against the minimum wage, and even today, when conservatives make it, they are accused of ? you guessed it ? social Darwinism. But for the progressives at the dawn of the fascist movement, this was an argument for it. “Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Webb observed, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners.”
[E.A.] Ross put it succinctly: “The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.” Since the inferior races were content to live closer to a filthy state of nature than the Nordic man, the savages did not require a civilized wage. Hence if you raised minimum wages to a civilized level, employers wouldn’t hire such miscreants in preference to “fitter” specimens, making them less likely to reproduce and, if necessary, easier targets for forced sterilization.
In addition to its harmful effects, the minimum wage’s history is deplorable.
