Minimum Wage: Helpful? Or Not?

by Bob Weeks on January 19, 2009

What’s one of the barriers to advancement by minorities in the workplace? We’re told that the minimum wage law is a guarantee that workers will not be exploited by greedy employers. But does it really work that way? Art Carden writes this in his article The Minimum Wage, Discrimination, and Inequality:

Milton Friedman openly argued that minimum-wage laws are racist in effect if not intent; in the early 1960s, he pointed out that, as a result of higher minimum wages, black teenage unemployment was much higher than it would otherwise be. Denied the opportunity to earn incomes and to acquire valuable skills, those adversely affected by the minimum wage were not allowed to share in the general prosperity that a market economy produces. Empirical evidence reported by economists David Neumark and William Wascher suggests that among the long-run effects of minimum wages are lower degrees of educational attainment, less on-the-job training, and lower lifetime earnings.

Minimum wage laws are one of the many examples of how well-intentioned policies meant to help people actually hurt them.

More coverage of this issue on the Voice For Liberty in Wichita may be found in these articles:
Unintended But Foreseeable Harms of the Minimum Wage
Problem of Low Wages Not Easily Solved
The Descent of The Good Column
In Central-Northeast Wichita, Government is Cause of Problem, Not Solution

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Tagged as: Economics, Interventionism, Minimum wage

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