Recommended: Minimum Wage Madness

Thomas Sowell has written another of his economics articles going right to the common-sense core of the problem. His piece today in RealClearPolitics entitled Minimum Wage Madness makes the same point I made a month or so ago - if the minimum wage is more than the worker is worth, they simply don't get jobs.

The minimum wage idea is not an economic idea; it is an ideological idea. Like so many ideological ideas, it sounds great on paper, but it doesn't fit with reality. As the old saying goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

This is one of those cases. Sowell provides some interesting statistics which seem to support the argument that unemployment, especially of the youth, is far lower in places and at times with no minimum wage than when a minimum wage law is present. That is common sense. If, for example, children delivering newspapers had to be paid minimum wage, there simply would be no paperboy jobs for youngsters to earn pocket money, and more important, to learn valuable work habits.