The Secret History of the Minimum Wage (New at Reason)
In the July issue of Reason, Deirdre McCloskey reviews Princeton economist Thomas C. Leonard’s “elegant and persuasive” new book Illiberal Reformers, which takes a historically-based look at the minimum wage.
McCloskey presents a debate between you (the reader) and George, “your dear progressive friend who stoutly defends the minimum wage” with the “historical argument that the Industrial Revolution was caused by exploiting workers, and…that we got rich subsequently by struggling against the exploitation.”
But, McCloskey writes:
Leonard shows in detail that the minimum wage arose in the early 20th century as a Progressive policy designed to screw low-wage workers. Designed. And unlike many other laws “designed” to achieve a result (for example, protective tariffs designed to enrich America), the minimum wage achieved what it was after.
McCloskey also relates this provocative bit of inconvenient history:
“Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” wrote the British socialist Sidney Webb in 1912 in the University of Chicago’s Journal of Political Economy, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.” What was to become of them when the minimum wage excluded them from employment? Henry Rogers Seager, a Progressive economist at Columbia, gave in 1913 the usual reply: “If we are to maintain a race that is to be made up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization.”
Source: http://reason.com/blog/2016/06/12/the-secret-history-of-the-minimum-wage-n
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