Should There Be a Minimum Wage?

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Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Dennis HackethalOP·​#6149·​

Effective or not, at least the advocates of the minimum wage have good intentions.

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Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Dennis HackethalOP·​#6153·​·​Criticism

Sowell also argues:

If [today’s advocates of the minimum wage] thought things through, how could they have imagined that having large numbers of idle teenage boys hanging out on the streets together would be good for any community — especially in places where most of these youngsters were raised by single mothers, another unintended consequence, in this case, of well-meaning welfare policies?

Thomas Sowell, ‘Minimum-Wage Laws Have Consequences’, 2013, National Review

And, as mentioned in #6148, minimum-wage laws have had “devastating effects … on black teenage unemployment rates” in particular.

So it’s especially contradictory to advocate minimum-wage laws on social-justice grounds.

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