On Minimum Wage, Democrats Have Lost Their Marbles
And grasp of elementary economy logic
Minimum wage hikes are back in vogue among progressives. With a vengeance. Bernie and Hillary are demanding
more than a doubling of the current minimum wage to $15 an hour, the highest by far in the "free" (or unfree) world. California and New York have already obliged.
But this is insanity. Such laws will make the American labor market even more rigid than the European one, rendering it unable to accommodate any shift in the supply of workers, negating a key strength of the American economy. They'll also, as in many European countries like Spain, result in a quarter of the youth being unemployed.
It is true that the academic consensus on this issue has shifted a bit in the last decade. But the extravagant claims that liberals are now making to justify their calls demonstrate a breathtaking lapse of elementary economic logic. I debunk four of them in my column at The Week.
Go here to read them.
