Monday, May 4, 2015

On the Main Intent of British Columbia's 1925 Minimum Wage Law Being to Price Japanese Immigrants Out of Positions in the Lumber Industry

Yeah, it worked and whitey got all the jobs.

2 comments:

dmarks said...

In all fairness, I have argued on the minimum wage for years with progressives/etc and have never seen such reasons in their empassioned defense of the idea. And I don't think they were hiding this sort of view, either.

But I won't argue with you on the across-the-board nefarious origins of some of the policies, nor of the unintended consequences. Well, they seem to have been a lot more intended back then.

You can also talk about some modern results, like low-skill wage earners (youth) losing jobs, while illegal immigrants working at a lot of jobs too due to it.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Yeah, I didn't mean that the modern day proponents of the law are motivated by racism (though the law still hurts young blacks by pricing them out of the market - a point of view shared by over 90% of the economists).