Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

But to understand why these laws make it harder for blacks to find jobs, it first helps to look at how minimum-wage laws impact labor markets in general. And it turns out that economists, a famously argumentative lot, tend to agree that minimum-wage laws destroy jobs. In fact, polls have shown that more than 90 percent of professional economists contend that increasing the minimum wage lowers employment for minimum-wage workers. Even highly respected economists such as David Card and Alan Krueger, who are skeptical of the consensus view, concede that the minimum-wage hypothesis “is one of the clearest and most widely appreciated in the field of economics.”3 Why? Because a basic tenet of economics is that a rise in the cost of something tends to lower demand for it. Put another way, an artificial increase in the price of something causes less of it to be purchased. When that something is the price of labor, the result is a labor surplus, also known as unemployment. “It’s simple,” wrote Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992, “hike the minimum wage and you put people out of work.”4 In 2008 economists David Neumark and William Wascher published a book that surveyed the minimum-wage literature of the previous three decades. They reviewed more than one hundred academic studies on the impact of such laws and found “overwhelming” evidence that younger, lesser-skilled workers suffer what economists call “disemployment effects,” or a loss of employment when the m...