FreedomTalks

 

Greg Franke has a good piece on the minimum wage over at Human Events Online. He takes the demagoguery head on.

“Foremost among these is the continual harping by the Democrats that an increase in the minimum wage is needed as a life-raft to any poor souls out there struggling to provide for a family on $5.15 an hour.

Though a recent attempt failed to ram a hike in the federal minimum wage past Congress on the back of a morally right (and economically defensible) reduction in the death tax, efforts to jack up the minimum wage at the state level continue unabated.”

Franke continues,

“First of all, it’s common knowledge—to anyone wishing to know—that the majority of minimum wage earners are not family providers struggling to bring home the bacon.  They’re young, predominantly single people just getting started in their working careers.  Thus, they have no need for all of the items listed above for anyone but themselves.

They’re the ones who stand to be hurt most when an increase in the government-mandated wage rate does what it always has—make people with lesser job skills more expensive to employ than the value they give in return, and therefore expendable.

Thomas Sowell’s chapter on the minimum wage in his book Basic Economics provides more great information on this.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 11:03 am and is filed under States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.