Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
The Racist Minimum Wage
Today Prof. Walter Williams tackles one of my favorite subjects, the minimum wage. The prevailing public sentiment is ripe for logical assault on hardly any other issue, compared to the vulnerability under which it labors on this one. A minimum wage is a fairly simple concept: Exemptions aside, all “workers” must be paid at least so much “wage,” or else the employer is in violation. This correlates to a prohibition against the employer hiring anybody, until that employer is sufficiently solvent to pay the wage.
This is a logical equivalent, not an opinion. It is not subject to reasonable dispute. You need three new employees and you can allocate $20 an hour for all three of them, a minimum wage of $6.75 plus benefits limits the hire to only two. This cannot be quibbled, anymore than you can quibble over two plus two being four. Minimum wage sends the third hire home, to live with his parents and draw unemployment, regardless of his desires, the desires of his colleagues, or of his employer.
I’m a little frustrated with Williams’ article here because he has earned my admiration as a devastating logical warrior, and his attack on the logically-gangrenous minimum wage appendage here is purely anecdotal, not logical. He uses his anecdotes to support that the minimum wage is racist:
Minimum wages can have a more insidious effect. In research for my book “South Africa’s War Against Capitalism” (1989), I 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.
Gert Beetge, secretary of South Africa’s avowedly racist Building Worker’s Union, in response to contractors hiring black workers, said, “There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances I support the rate-for-the-job [minimum wages] as the second best way of protecting our white artisans.” Racists recognized the discriminatory effects of mandated minimum wages.
I’m left hungering for more. I was brought up with the notion that racism was wrong, because in considering questions of Do I want to hire this person? Do I want to work with this person? Do I want to live next to this person? — it ascribes an importance to skin color, an attribute purely irrelevant to such determinations.
How is skin color relevant to minimum wage, then? How does Secretary Beetge plan to use it to keep the black man down, without likewise victimizing the white guys?
I flailed around looking for Prof. Williams’ book, and found it on Amazon: You can get it for $45 used, $90 new. Yikes! Like most people who harbor deep suspicions and biases against the minimum wage, I’m a cheapass. I looked further.
It turns out you can browse the whole book on Cato.org. Rrrrr? That doesn’t seem right. A pro-capitalism book you can buy on Amazon for almost a C-note, or you can read it for free on another web site if you look further? Oh well, the Prof. can work that out with Cato. But I digress. The relevant passage is on pp. 81-2, chapter 4.
In addition to all the exemptions, there was a massive evasion and contravention of the job reservation laws. In 1974, the Industrial Tribunal reported that it found “alarming malpractices” on visits to building sites, with blacks “openly engaged” in nearly all classes of skilled construction. During this period, hundreds of building contractors were prosecuted for contravention of the law but even more managed to escape. After a while, however, the minister of labour became more and more reluctant to prosecute job reservation violations, despite union accusations that there had been a “cold-blooded sellout” of white workers.
The failure of job reservation to protect white workers from competition with blacks led Beetge of the Building Workers Union to plead that “There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances I support the rate for the job as the second best way of protecting our White artisans.”
That’s all I can find, just a little back-story. I’m not clear on how you keep the black worker down through a policy of minimum wage.
But I can hazard a guess.
The minimum wage policies just tend to make a market more static. It’s no secret that in the United States today, liberals tend to see people as born to be rich or poor, lumbering from nursery toward the gravesite with “R” or “P” branded onto their foreheads the whole time; the idealogues we call “conservative” tend to see people amassing great fortunes, losing them again, gaining them again — essentially, having good days and bad, prospering and suffering, as living things do. Minimum wage helps to make the liberal viewpoint a self-fulfilling prophecy. A man makes six dollars an hour because that’s what minimum wage laws say he should be making. What will he make next year? The year after? Five years from now? Smart money says, he’ll be making the same six dollars.
Like any other policy that is essentially socialist, the minimum-wage law transforms a living thing into a thing that is not quite so alive. What was dynamic is now static. It isn’t hard to see how this is helpful to a racist union interest struggling away in the middle of a market of racism that is slowly melting away.
Does this prove that minimum wage laws are inherently racist? No. But Williams’ anecdote does prove that some of them have been. It’s a good thing to know about a policy so frequently advanced as a way to help poor people. The minimum wage law is unlikely to have that effect, and it can’t even present a pure history of having that intent.
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