Monday, July 30, 2012

The Crippling Nature of Minimum-Wage Laws - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

The Crippling Nature of Minimum-Wage Laws - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily: "In truth, there is only one way to regard a minimum-wage law: it is compulsory unemployment, period. The law says, it is illegal, and therefore criminal, for anyone to hire anyone else below the level of X dollars an hour. This means, plainly and simply, that a large number of free and voluntary wage contracts are now outlawed and hence that there will be a large amount of unemployment. Remember that the minimum-wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result."

"this means that the people who will be disemployed and devastated by this prohibition will be precisely the "marginal" (lowest wage) workers, e.g. blacks and teenagers, the very workers whom the advocates of the minimum wage are claiming to foster and protect."

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