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Is It Time to Raise the Minimum Wage?

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During World War II, the Office of Price Administration (OPA), established by one of Franklin Roosevelt’s executive orders in 1941, was given the power to ration the supply of certain goods and freeze prices on all goods except agricultural commodities. The OPA was abolished in 1946 and is generally defended today only as a wartime measure. Richard Nixon’s “temporary” imposition of wage and price controls in 1971, turned into more than two years of Soviet-style central planning in the United States with a cost-of-living council and pay boards and price commissions to approve requested price increases after a 90-day freeze. I don’t know of anyone of any political persuasion who defends Nixon’s actions today. For some strange reason, the price of labor is viewed differently. The federal minimum has been at $7.25 since 2009. It is the result of the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, which raised the federal minimum wage in three steps from $5.15 per hour to $5.85 per ...

Why We Should Not Raise the Minimum Wage

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The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009. Although this is a long way from the first federal minimum wage of $0.25 an hour in the 1930s, it is not high enough according to some members of Congress, a group of over one hundred professional economists, President Obama, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project, and Juliette Fairley, who brings all this to our attention in her MainStreet.com article “Why We Should Raise the Minimum Wage.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 5 percent of U.S. hourly-paid workers have wages at or below the prevailing federal minimum (there are some exemptions to the minimum-wage provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act). Minimum-wage workers tend to be people who are young, have never been married, are unskilled, have no more than a high-school education, work part-time, and work in the leisure and hospitality sectors of the economy. Representative ...

Minimum Wage, Maximum Intervention, Part 2

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Part 1 | Part 2 All arguments for the minimum wage come down to this: since no family can survive on an income lower than the minimum wage, it is the job of government to mandate a minimum wage to keep people out of poverty. No matter how elaborate the argument, this is the bottom line. Even if that were a true statement it would still not be a valid argument for the minimum wage. If someone can’t support a family on his salary, then he should not have a family until he has a higher salary. It is not the fault of business or society that an unskilled and uneducated worker decides to have a family and then finds out that he can’t make ends meet. Moreover, why should the person who is giving him a job be forced to fund his excess expenses? Indeed, why should anyone be forced to do so? The case against the minimum ...