Quote of the Day: The Ethics of Minimum Wage

The biggest problem I have with the standard analysis of the minimum wage–on either side of the ideological divide–is that it shows a certain lack of imagination. It presumes that market forces work only on quantity and price. So that when legislation artificially raises price, the debate is over the impact on quantity–how many jobs will be lost (or gained if you’re on the other side.)

But price and quantity are not the only way market forces work. And they are certainly not the only attributes of a job. There is how hard you have to work, how many breaks you get, how much training or mentoring or kindness. What amenities are in the workplace–snack bar, vending machine, nicely decorated walls and so on. When the government requires that wages be higher than what they would otherwise be, that creates an increase in the number of people who would like to work and reduces the number of opportunities available.

Ironically, the minimum wage creates a reserve army of the unemployed. That in turn allows employers to be less thoughtful, helpful, and kind. It destroys the civilizing effect of competition by muting it. That encourages exploitation. It reduces the cost to employers of racism or cruelty. Before the increase, being obnoxious or racist made it much harder to find employees. A minimum wage makes it easier to indulge in bad behavior. The costs are lower. Before the minimum wage, a cruel, selfish employer might have had to mentor his employees or train them or be nice to them despite his nature. Now he won’t have to. He can still get workers to work for him. Even more cruelly, the minimum wage encourages workers to exploit themselves.

This is from Standard University research fellow, author and blogger Russ Roberts at the Café Hayek.

Mr. Roberts captures the largely unseen human dimension in the impact, not just of minimum wages, but of the stereotyped debate on myriad regulations: the excessive focus on price and quantity via mathematical formalism or "scientism" which plagues mainstream analysis.