This weekend at Townhall, a recurring subject, but with a British twist: why support a minimum wage if it doesn’t do the good claimed for it? Maybe the backers don’t uniformly want the good. Could they want the bad?
Which brings up the question of cynicism. We who aim to help the poor, as opposed to those who advocate policy just make themselves feel good, should be immune from the charge of “cynicism.”
Even if we are often very skeptical of the politics and rhetoric surrounding “the minimum wage.”
Click on over, then back here for more reading:
- Minimum Wage, Maximum Damage, by Jim Cox
- “Reich is Wrong on the Minimum Wage,” by Donald Boudreaux
- “A Simple Question for Minimum Wage Advocates,” by Donald Boudreaux
- Last week’s Common Sense, “A British Puzzle,” that gave the short version of this weekend’s Townhall lesson.
- For an overview of the main economic theories of wage-rate determination over the last 300 years, an economicconcepts.com article goes into some detail. It is better than Britannica’s account, for example, in that it does not give any credence to “the bargaining theory,” which, too often, assumes that prices do not really matter, are infinitely malleable by powerful negotiators. That just cannot be true. Prices have consequences. Wage rates do, too. They should reflect real supplies and real demands, so we can adapt ourselves to real human needs and not phantom wishes and hopes and dreams that can come to nothing.