MayerBlog: The Web Log of
|
|
|
Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly
Ohio is one of several states that will have a proposal on the November ballot to increase the state’s minimum wage. (In Ohio, it is Issue 2, a proposed amendment to the state constitution – a complex provision that, if approved by the voters, will not only exacerbate the many evils that result from minimum-wage laws generally, but will also raise many other dangers, as discussed below.) It is a truly bad measure that ought to be soundly defeated at the polls. Indeed, if public policy were determined by reason rather than emotion, or by special-interest politics, it wouldn’t be an increase in the minimum wage that we’d be debating; rather, we should be debating the total repeal of all minimum-wage laws. Raising the government-dictated minimum wage has become the chief domestic policy issue this fall for so-called “progressive” activists – the coalition of Democrat politicians, Big Labor thugs, and various left-wing political advocacy groups that comprise the core constituency of leftist liberalism today. As I maintained in my previous essay “Reactionary `Progressives’” (March 16, 2006), the term progressive is a misnomer: people who call themselves “progressive” are really reactionaries, advocating not genuine progress at all but rather a continuation of the failed policies of the past – the paternalistic policies of the 20th-century “welfare state,” which were in turn based on European paternalistic models, traced through Bismarck’s Germany in the late 19th century all the way back to medieval feudalism. Minimum wage laws epitomize such Old World paternalism: they use the coercive power of government in a way that is incompatible with a free-market, individualist, capitalist society like the United States. They are, in a very real sense, un-American. And they violate the rights of both employers and employees. The title for this week’s entry comes from a splendid op-ed, “Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly,” written by George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams and published in Capitalism Magazine earlier this year. (Dr. Williams used the same title for Chapter 3 of his 1982 book, The State Against Blacks.) In the op-ed, Dr. Williams writes about the many “dead wrong” errors told on an Oprah Winfrey show episode titled “Inside the Lives of People Living on Minimum Wage.” Contrary to the show’s claim that 30 million Americans received the minimum wage (referring to the federal minimum of $5 an hour, which is actually $5.15 an hour), U.S. Department of Labor statistics show that out of some 74 million American workers paid at hourly rates, only 520,000 were reported as earning exactly $5.15. Workers earning the minimum wage or less tend to be young, single workers between the ages of 16 and 25; only about 2 percent of workers over the age of 25 earn minimum wages. Moreover, 63% of minimum wage workers receive raises within one year of employment, and only 15% still earn the minimum wage after three years. Furthermore, only 5.3 of minimum wage earners are from households below the official poverty line; 40% live in households with incomes $60,000 and higher. As Dr. Williams notes, these statistics shatter many of the myths commonly propagated about minimum wage workers. The stereotypical sob story told by many journalists of a parent trying to raise a family on a minimum wage is not the typical situation of minimum-wage earners, who are young, single, and unskilled workers, new entrants into the labor market. As he notes, “The effect of minimum wages is that of causing unemployment among low-skilled workers. If an employer must pay $5.15 an hour, plus mandated fringes that might bring the employment cost of a worker to $7 an hour, does it pay him to hire a person who is so unfortunate as to have skills that permit him to produce only $4 worth of value per hour? Most employers would view hiring such a person as a losing economic proposition.” So, naturally, they do not hire persons whose labor is thus over-priced. That’s why, as Williams notes, two important surveys of academic economists – reported in the American Economic Review in May 1979 and May 1992 – revealed that 80-90% of economists agreed that raising the minimum wage causes unemployment among youth and low-skilled workers. “Minimum wages can have a more insidious effect,” Dr. Williams added, noting that in doing research for his book South Africa’s War Against Capitalism (1989), he found that “during South Africa’s apartheid era, racist unions, who’d never admit blacks, were the major supporters of higher minimum wages for blacks.” As discussed below, the history of minimum-wage laws in the United States shows a similar racist effect: mandated minimum wages harm young black workers, particularly. “It’s tempting to think of higher minimum wages as an anti-poverty weapon, but such an idea doesn’t even pass the smell test,” Williams concludes. “After all, if higher minimum wages could cure poverty, we could easily end worldwide poverty simply by telling poor nations to legislate higher minimum wages.” The folly of such a policy should be apparent to any reasoning person. “Poor people are not poor because of low wages. For the most part, they’re poor because of low productivity, and wages are connected to productivity.” Merely compelling employers to pay higher wages to low-skilled workers doesn’t help in any way to increase productivity. That’s why, as Williams observed at the end of Chapter 3 of his book The State Against Blacks, raising the minimum wage really does nothing to help the poor; it “makes about as much sense, and accomplishes about as much, as doctors curing patients by merely declaring that they are cured.” Minimum-wage laws should be repealed because they’re wrong. They’re bad public policy: they harm the people they’re supposed to help; they impose an additional burden on businesses; and they aggrandize Big Labor’s monopoly power in American society. Moreover, minimum-wage laws also violate people’s rights: they violate the rights of employers, and they also violate the rights of workers. If our courts were to protect individual freedom and property rights as they should, they would rule – as they once did – that minimum-wage laws are unconstitutional. States like Ohio, rather than amending the state constitution to mandate an increase in the minimum wage, ought to be amending the constitution to abolish the existing minimum-wage laws.
Weakening the Weak: The Harmful Economics of Minimum-Wage Laws
That minimum-wage laws harm the very people they are supposed to help – the “weak,” or “powerless”: young, unskilled, female, or minority workers – is a well-established fact, both in history and in sound economics. The earliest minimum-wage laws in the United States, enacted in several states and the District of Columbia in the early 20th century, applied only to women and children; they were advocated by their supporters as so-called “protective laws,” designed to help women. As the late feminist scholar Joan Kennedy Taylor has argued, however, their real economic effect – and the real intent of at least some of their supporters – was to hurt women, by putting them at a competitive disadvantage with men in the labor market. (See Joan Kennedy Taylor’s essay, “Protective Labor Legislation,” in Wendy McElroy’s 1991 book, Freedom, Feminism, and the State: An Overview of Individualist Feminism, showing that “protective” legislation actually diminished the employment opportunities of women). Consider, for example, the District of Columbia minimum-wage law that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional, in its 1923 decision, Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (discussed below). The law was passed by Congress in 1918, just as World War I was ending – at a time when women had moved into factory jobs and other types of employment traditionally held by men, while men were overseas fighting in the war. The law created a three-member board that was given the power to fix wages for women, in each type of occupation, at whatever level the board considered necessary to maintain women “in good health” and “to protect their morals.” The law was challenged by the Children’s Hospital, which employed “a large number of women in various capacities,” some of whom worked for wages below the minimum fixed by the board. In a second case joined to the hospital’s challenge, Ms. Willie Lyons, a 21-year-old elevator operator employed by the Congress Hall Hotel also challenged the law; she had lost her job after the board had determined that a woman in her occupation could not be employed for less than twice what she had been paid. (Ms. Lyons had been employed at a salary of $35 per month and two meals a day, and she considered her work “light and healthful, the hours short, with surroundings clean and moral”; she wanted to continue working at the hotel, and the hotel “would have been glad to retain her.” The board, however, had determined that a woman in her occupation could not be employed for less than $71.50 per month, and so the hotel hired a man in her stead.) Hadley Arkes, in his biography of Justice George Sutherland (the author of the Court’s opinion ruling the law unconstitutional), poignantly summarizes the case by observing how the law, “in its liberal tenderness, in its concern to protect women, had brought about a situation in which women were being replaced, in their jobs, by men.” In the late 1930s, following the so-called “New Deal revolution” on the Supreme Court – which resulted in, among other things, the reversal of the Adkins decision (and with it, an end to the Court’s protection of economic liberty as a fundamental right) – Congress passed the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which imposed a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour, rising to 40 cents an hour over the next seven years (about $5.00 in today’s dollars), the first nationwide minimum wage law. As historian Burton Fulsom has shown, “[t]he driving force behind the legislation was not the working poor . . . but the highly paid textile workers of New England, who were eager to protect their jobs” against competition from lower-wage workers in the South. Politicians in Massachusetts, led by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and House Minority Leader Joseph Martin, battled in Congress for a law that would force Southern textile mills to raise wages and thereby lose their competitive edge. For a while, Southern congressmen successfully fought against the legislation, arguing – with economists – that people whose skills and experience were worth less than whatever Congress decreed as the minimum would be priced out of the labor market. The Great Depression would get worse for those workers by Congress telling them, in effect, “If you can’t find a job that pays at least the minimum, then you’re not allowed to work.” Rep. Carl Mapes (R.-Mich.) predicted, “The enactment of this legislation will further increase unemployment, not reduce it. It is bound to increase unemployment unless all human experience is reversed.” Mapes was right: the law has most harmed workers with limited skills, desperately trying to secure a foothold on the first step of the job ladder. Steady hikes in the federal minimum wage have made jobs disappear for the most vulnerable workers, especially black persons, teenagers, and women with limited skills – often “the first to be fired and the last to be hired because their labor is not yet worth what the law says they must be paid,” as Fulsom aptly sums it up. In 1956, Congress raised the minimum wage from 75 cents to $1.00 an hour, and non-white teenage unemployment spiraled from 14% to 24%. The 1996 hike in the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour had a similar effect: Unemployment among black male teenagers jumped from 37% to 41%. (Burton Fulsom, “The Minimum Wage’s Disreputable Origins,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 1998.) As noted above, economist Walter Williams has detailed the harmful effects of minimum wage laws on black persons in Chapter 3 of his 1982 book, The State Against Blacks. He concludes, “The minimum wage law, as well as many other laws that have placed minimum prices on labor transactions, has imposed incalculable harm on the most disadvantaged members of our society.” An increased minimum wage, in effect, tells firms not to hire people who lack the education, training, and skills necessary to produce the corresponding level of goods or services. Employers will hire workers with more experience or simply leave marginal positions unfilled. A rising minimum wage thus hurts the most vulnerable members of society, especially poorly educated minority youth, by destroying their opportunities for employment. Most economists agree with Dr. Williams. Indeed, it is difficult to understand how any reputable economist could disagree with the reality of the laws of supply and demand, which inevitably mean that increases in the minimum wage result in increased unemployment among the least skilled and least experienced workers, the value of whose labor is below the legislated minimum. As Finis Welch, a professor of economics at Texas A&M University points out, “When wages or other prices are artificially increased, less will be bought. This well-trod soil, the economists’ law of demand, is as true today as when Adam Smith first described it more than two centuries ago.” In the words of Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, “there is overwhelming consensus that the higher minimum wage would reduce employment, and those who are most displaced will be the low-skilled youth who now have the hardest time getting work. The experience of Europe, where the unemployment rate has now reached twice that of the United States, shows the danger of traveling along the road to higher minimum wages.” (“Minimum Wage vs. Supply and Demand,” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 1996.) Nevertheless, proponents of minimum wage increases have cited some economists who maintain otherwise. In 1996, when the Clinton Administration and some Democrats in Congress (chiefly Senator Ted Kennedy, of Massachusetts), were advocating an increase, proponents cited a study by two Princeton University economists with close ties to the Clinton Administration, David Card and Alan Krueger, who made the remarkable claim that increasing the minimum wage might actually increase employment among low-wage workers. But their revisionist position was based on flawed research, which examined (through telephone surveys) only one industry (fast-food restaurants) in two states and which failed to examine the impact of minimum-wage changes after a year. A more comprehensive study by economist David Neumark, who used data from all 50 states over a 15-year period, found that a 10-percent increase in the minimum wage reduces employment among young workers by 1 to 2 percent – thus confirming the long-held consensus among economists that minimum wages, rather than helping the poorest workers, make it harder for them to find jobs. A more recent study by David Neumark, working with William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board, shows that increases in minimum wages actually redistribute income among poor families by giving wage increases to some (those lucky enough to keep their jobs after the increase) and putting others out of work. They estimate that the federal minimum-wage increase of 1996 and 1997 increase the proportion of poor families by one-half to one percentage point. And, considering the long run, Neumark and Olena Nizalove have found that even people in their late 20s worked less and earned less the longer they were exposed to a high minimum wage, presumably because the minimum wage destroyed job opportunities early in their work life. (David R. Henderson, “Minimum Wage, Minimum Sense,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 25-26, 2006.) As part of the current debate, the Employment Policy Institute – a Big Labor think tank – released an “economists’ statement” earlier this month supporting an increase in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 per hour. The headline read, “Hundreds of Economists Say: Raise the Minimum Wage,” but as some economist-bloggers have pointed out, the signatories to the statement were not all economists. (For example, as Lawrence H. White recently observed on the “Division of Labour” group blog, none of the six UCLA “economists” listed teaches in the economics department. He concludes that there’s “less here than meets the eye.”) As James M. Buchanan, a 1986 Novel laureate in economics, observes, “Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”
Aggrandizing Power: Why Big Labor and Democrat Politicians Support Minimum-Wage Increases
It’s not surprising that Big Labor supports increases in the government-mandated minimum wage. Other than those current minimum wage workers who are lucky enough to be retained by their employers at the higher wage, the only class of workers whom minimum wage increases seem to benefit, indirectly, are union workers. Although they make several times the hourly wages of minimum wage workers, union members are helped by minimum wage increases because higher bottom wages ultimately boost the pay they can bargain for. As Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute has observed, “while union leaders like to talk about helping the working poor, they know that federal wage-fixing sets a floor under their members’ earnings by knocking lower-paid workers out of the market.” George Reisman explains how labor unions benefit from minimum wage increases, in his authoritative book, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996). “Minimum-wage and prounion legislation operate to reserve labor markets to the exclusive possession of the reduced number of workers who can be employed at the higher wage rates such legislation establishes. Minimum-wage and pro-union legislation forcibly exclude from the market the additional number of workers who could be employed at the lower wage rates that the freedom of competition would establish. Such legislation also tends to reserve labor markets to the exclusive possession of the more skilled workers, by virtue of impairing the ability specifically of the less skilled workers to compete through the acceptance of lower wage rates” (p. 382). In other words, minimum wage laws, by undermining the ability of less-skilled workers to compete, enhance the monopoly power – and the higher-than-market-rate wages resulting from that power – that union members demand. Reisman concludes, “Although the avowed purpose of minimum-wage laws is to help unskilled workers, by providing them with a better income, their actual effect is to achieve the exact opposite. . . . [M]inimum-wage laws cause unemployment, a lifelong depressing effect on the earnings of many of those forced into unemployment, and harm in particular the least-skilled, most-disadvantaged members of society” (p. 660). The actual economic effect of higher minimum wages shows how disingenuous labor leaders are when they claim to be helping poorer people by advocating minimum-wage increases. They’re liars: rather than helping, they are hurting lower-skilled workers by preventing them from competing, in order to help maintain their own high wages. (For a similar reason, the union-led “anti-sweatshop” movement on many college campuses across the USA is also misguided. Idealistic, but very naïve, college students and their professors are being hoodwinked by Big Labor into thinking that by boycotting goods produced in Third World “sweatshops,” they’re helping poor people in foreign countries. What they’re really doing is to help maintain high union wages in the U.S. by destroying the only economically realistic opportunity poor people in Third World countries have to better their lives.) Minimum-wage laws have an even more pernicious effect on less-skilled workers – another harm to them that benefits Big Labor, furthering entrenching its market power – as Reisman also explains. The extent to which minimum-wage laws cause unemployment “depends on the extent of union activity in the economic system”: “The more the unions close off employment opportunities, the greater is the number of workers forced to seek employment elsewhere, and thus the greater is the downward pressure on wage rates elsewhere. Thus, the greater is the number who will be unemployed, as the result of the minimum-wage law, which, in effect, closes the gates in the occupations still free from the imposition of union wage-scales against the workers still streaming in from the branches of production subject to union wage-scales.” The interesting implication of these facts is this: “the problem of low wages, which a minimum-wage law is intended to remedy, would be far less serious in the absence of the ability of labor unions to impose their artificially high pay-scales. If the power of the unions to impose such pay-scales ceased to exist, wages in the portion of the economic system that presently manages to remain free of union pay-scales would be higher, because fewer workers would need to seek employment in those industries, since they would be able to be employed in what are now the industries subject to union pay-scales” (Capitalism, p. 659). Not surprisingly, then, the call today for a higher minimum wage comes from the leaders of organized labor (mostly the AFL-CIO and the government employee unions) and from politicians (mostly Democrats, but including some left-liberal and “moderate” Republicans) who seek to appease Big Labor in order to get its support in the November elections. Democrats have an additional reason to support proposals to increase the minimum wage – and to put such proposals on the ballot – which results from the support for such proposals from organized labor, a key element of the Democratic Party’s “core” constituency. Just as Republicans in 2004 exploited ballot proposals to ban same-sex marriage, in order to increase voter turnout among their social conservative constituency, Democrats this year see the minimum wage issue as one that will draw more of their voters to the polls and thus elect their candidates – increasing Democrats’ chance to regain control of one or both houses of Congress, as well as some key governorships across the country. All six states with minimum wage increases on the ballot on November 7 are major election battlegrounds in this fall’s elections. Missouri, Montana, and Ohio have close Senate contests; Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Ohio have competitive governors’ contests (although in Ohio, polls show the Democratic candidate with a huge lead); and Arizona, Colorado, and Ohio have some of the most closely-watched House contests in the nation. (One other state, Michigan – where two incumbent Democrats, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, face competitive Republican challengers – had removed the minimum-wage issue from the Nov. 7 ballot when the Republican-controlled state legislature voted a few weeks ago to raise the state’s minimum wage from $5.15 an hour, the current federal level, to $6.95 and then to $7.15 in July 2007 and $7.40 in July 2008. The Michigan example shows that Republicans can be as guilty as Democrats in cynically exploiting the minimum-wage issue for their own partisan political advantages.) Another group that’s behind the current effort to raise federal and state minimum wages, as well as to persuade cities across the country to enact so-called “living wage” laws, is the group known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The group is guilty of not only advocating bad public policy but also rank hypocrisy: As Lawrence Reed of Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy reports, a few years ago, ACORN actually filed a lawsuit in California in an attempt to exempt itself from paying its own employees the state’s then-current $4.25 per hour minimum wage. In its legal brief, the organization declared that, “[T]he more that ACORN must pay each individual outreach worker . . . the fewer outreach workers it will be able to hire.” As Reed observes, “Hypocrisy has rarely been on more arrogant display.” (Lawrence W. Reed, “`Living Wage’ Law Is Public Policy at Its Worst,” Viewpoint on Public Issues, May 3, 1999.)
Violating Everyone’s Rights: Why Minimum-Wage Laws Are Unconstitutional
One other deleterious effect of minimum-wage legislation that today is frequently overlooked is its unfairness to employers, who are compelled by law to pay wages set arbitrarily by legislators without regard to the actual value of the employees’ labor. At one time, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized this aspect of minimum wage legislation and declared it unconstitutional, as a deprivation of liberty and property without due process of law in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. (This was at a time, in the early 20th century – prior to the so-called “New Deal revolution” of the late 1930s – when the Court protected “liberty of contract” as a fundamental right.) In the 1923 decision Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, the Court struck down a federal minimum wage law that applied to women working in the District of Columbia – a law that had the effect, if not the purpose, of driving women out of the workplace (as discussed above). In his opinion for the majority of the Court, Justice George Sutherland noted, among other problems, that the minimum wage law “takes account of the necessities of only one party to the [labor] contract. It ignores the necessities of the employer by compelling him to pay not less than a certain sum, not only whether the employee is capable of earning it, but irrespective of the ability of his business to sustain the burden.” The minimum wage, Sutherland concluded, was “a naked, arbitrary exercise of power” that “cannot be allowed to stand under the Constitution of the United States.” Unfortunately, Adkins was overruled by the Supreme Court fourteen years later, in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, when the Court upheld a minimum wage law in the state of Washington. West Coast Hotel was one of a series of 1937 decisions in which the Court upheld New Deal legislation – the so-called “New Deal revolution,” which ushered in a double standard in constitutional law. Since 1937 most legislation affecting property or other economic liberty interests has been upheld by the Court under a minimal “rational basis” standard of review, while the Court applies its higher “strict scrutiny” review to legislation affecting certain other non-economic liberty interests, the so-called “preferred freedoms” (meaning those rights preferred by left-liberal Supreme Court justices), such as those protected by the First Amendment, certain rights of accused persons under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and even certain unenumerated rights such as the “right to privacy.” Given what economists know about the harmful effects of a minimum wage law, it is doubtful that minimum wage legislation, if fairly considered by the courts, should withstand constitutional scrutiny under even the minimal rational basis test. Minimum wage laws simply have no rational basis; they blatantly harm both employers and those class of employees that they purport to protect. As explained above, minimum wage laws harm those workers who are less skilled or less experienced – entry-level workers whose labor is not worth the value arbitrarily set by legislators when they mandate a minimum wage. Minimum wage laws do not just harm such workers; they deprive them of their fundamental rights. Historically, one of the most valuable rights that Americans have had – a right that was broadly protected by the courts before 1937 – was the right to earn a livelihood. Minimum wage laws take away this right from the most vulnerable (the least-skilled, the most-disadvantaged) members of society. Such laws prohibit persons whose labor is not worth the mandated minimum from earning a livelihood – from using their own bodies and minds to work and to acquire the skills and experience that would enable them to earn higher wages. George Reisman describes this pernicious effect of minimum wage laws: “As a consequence of the unemployment they cause, minimum-wage laws deny many people the opportunity of acquiring work experience and the skills they might have acquired by means of working. In the absence of minimum-wage laws, many of the people who would have become employed at lower wages would not have had to earn such wages for the rest of their lives, but could have qualified themselves, through experience and skills acquired by working, for higher paying jobs later on. By aborting such individual processes of development, a minimum-wage law tends to exert a lifelong depressing effect on people. It both stops them from working and prevents them from becoming qualified for anything better than the kind of low-skilled jobs to which a minimum-wage law tends to apply.”
(Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, p. 659.) Reisman’s choice of words is particularly apt: Minimum wage laws truly do “abort” individuals’ ability to pursue employment. By thus depriving certain workers of their freedom to use their own bodies and minds to earn a living, minimum wages laws, properly viewed, should be seen, among other things, as depriving persons of their “right to privacy” as well as their fundamental right of economic freedom. As conservative columnist Thomas Sowell has observed, “The minimum wage law is very cleverly misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero – and that is what many inexperienced and low-skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.” (Sowell, “The ultimate minimum wage is zero,” The Washington Times National Weekly Edition, August 6-12, 2001.)
Ohio’s Issue 2: A Perverse Constitutional Amendment
As noted above, proposals to increase state government-mandated minimum wages will appear on the November ballot in several states, including Ohio. Issue 2 is a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would mandate a minimum wage of $6.85 with annual adjustments for inflation. The amendment would also require employees to maintain pay records for up to three years so that they would be available to employees or their representatives. And it would provide for lawsuits against employers who violate the law, with up to treble damages. This power grab by labor unions is sure not only to increase unemployment – the inevitable result of all minimum wage increases, as all credible economists agree – but also to hurt businesses in Ohio, a state already suffering from a depressed economy because of its high level of business taxation and regulation. Ohio has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs – a fifth of its total – in the past five years. The state’s 5.7% jobless rate is more than a full percentage point above the national mean. Adding to the costs of business, pricing unskilled workers out of the market, and imposing on employers even more reporting requirements (requirements that also make it easier to subject them to costly lawsuits) – all these will be the disastrous effects of Issue 2 on Ohio’s economy. Issue 2 would be bad enough, from a policy standpoint, if it were proposed as an ordinary law. But it’s proposed as a constitutional amendment, which makes it even more perverse. It means that the misguided policy of a government-mandated minimum wage not only becomes law but also becomes part of the fundamental law of the state, making this special-interest legislation difficult, if not impossible, to change by ordinary political processes. The purpose of constitutions is to limit the powers of government and to protect the rights of individuals – not to enact permanent laws that, in fact, violate people’s rights. If Ohio voters do amend the state constitution with regard to minimum-wage laws, the only appropriate and sensible amendment would be one that repeals the existing minimum-wage law and prohibits the legislature from passing any law that interferes with the freedom of the labor market. Similarly, Congress ought to repeal the federal law. Abolition of the minimum wage would allow wages for all workers to be set by the fairest method of all: an unfettered free market.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Friday, October 20, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
|