Listen or read the transcript from The Corbett Report here.
An excerpt:
The early progressive economists made no attempt to hide their eugenic motivations in promoting minimum wage laws.
Take Henry Rogers Seager, a Columbia economist and president of the American Association for Labor Legislation, who wrote in a key paper on the minimum-wage law published in The Annals of the American Academy in 1913:
“If we are to maintain a race that is to be made up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization of the congenitally defective. Michigan has just passed an act requiring the sterilization of congenital idiots. This may seem somewhat remote from the minimum wage but such a policy judiciously extended should make easier the task of each on-coming generation which insists that every individual who is regularly employed in the competitive labor market shall receive at least a living wage for his work.”
In 1910, Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist who served as Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Commissioner of Labor, opined that:
“It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law, even if it deprives these unfortunates of work. Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”
Arthur Holcombe, a Professor of Government at Harvard and a member of the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, wrote approvingly of how Australia’s own minimum wage laws:
“. . . protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese.”
This is the real history of the minimum wage in America. By their own admission, a belief in the eugenic effect of eradicating the lower classes from the gene pool is the reason that its early progressive proponents advocated for minimum wage laws at all.
Of course, no one is suggesting that the people marching under the Fight For $15 banner are eugenicists, or that they are trying to exterminate the “defective germplasm” of the “unemployables.” This is patently not the case.
Modern-day progressives instead turn to newer economic models and theories to defend their “living wage” movement. A highly cited 1994 study by Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger, for instance, purported to find that raises in minimum wage actually had, if anything, a positive effect on employment. If Card and Krueger’s findings are true, then, modern progressives might argue, it doesn’t matter why economists originally supported wage floors; the point is that they offer the working poor a hand up.
As the Minimum Wage Study at the University of Washington and similar research being conducted across academia are increasingly discovering, however, Card and Krueger’s paper (called an “intellectual revolution” by Paul Krugman) is incorrect or at the very least leaves out important details about the minimum wage’s true impact.