FROM ISSUE NUMBER 5 - FALL 1966 GO TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

CURRENT READING

One tends to be put off by a pamphlet called “The Minimum Wage: Who Pays?”, published by the Free Society Association, Barry Goldwater, Honorary Chairman. It doesn’t help to discover that the pamphlet takes the form of an “interview” with Professors Yale Brozen and Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, who can hardly be described as uncommitted inquiring spirits. Their thesis is that the statutory minimum wage hurts precisely the people it is intended to help. At any moment there must be many marginal workers– unskilled, uneducated, badly located– who are just barely worth hiring at the going minimum wage; raise that minimum and sooner or later some of them will become unemployed. To the extent that marginal workers are predominantly Negroes, or young people, or old people, to that extent a high minimum wage concentrates unemployment on those groups.

To download a PDF of the full article, please click here.