Newsweek gives columnist Robert J. Samuelson some extra space this week to honor the late Milton Friedman.
The two-page spread also includes excerpts from Friedman’s old Newsweek columns on school choice, the volunteer Army, and minimum-wage rates:
The groups that will be hurt the most are the low-paid and the unskilled. Many well-meaning people favor legal minimum-wage rates in the mistaken belief that they help the poor. These people confuse wage rates with wage income. It has always been a mystery to me to understand why a youngster is better off unemployed at $1.60 an hour than employed at $1.25.
Friedman’s argument loses none of its relevance 40 years after he wrote it.
9:06 p.m. update:
Ben Stein tackles the same topic in TIME:
Friedman, as much as anyone, stood athwart history and cried “Stop” as it seemed headed towards collectivism–only he did it with a masterly, genius-level grasp of mathematics, history and statistics. He proved, inasmuch as it can be proved, that free markets would not impoverish the poor but enrich them, would not ride roughshod over the downtrodden but would empower them.
