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The Origin of the Minimum Wage in the Progressive Eugenics Movement
Maybe I knew this and just forgot about it somehow, I dunno. But this 2005 paper from Princeton economist Thomas Leonard on the racist/eugenics/progressive origin of the minimum wage is pretty fascinating stuff. It’s a strange world:
Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics, believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service of ridding the labor force of the “unemployable.” Sidney and Beatrice Webb put it plainly: “With regard to certain sections of the population [the “unemployable”], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” “[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Sidney Webb opined in the Journal of Political Economy, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.” … A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants and also by removing from employment the “unemployable,” who, thus identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized. …
It continues:
In his Principles of Economics, Frank Taussig asked rhetorically, “how to deal with the unemployable?” Taussig identified two classes of unemployable worker, distinguishing the aged, infirm and disabled from the “feebleminded . . . those saturated with alcohol or tainted with hereditary disease . . . [and] the irretrievable criminals and tramps. . . .” The latter class, Taussig proposed, “should simply be stamped out.” “We have not reached the stage,” Taussig allowed, “where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.”
In his Races and Immigrants, the University of Wisconsin economist and social reformer John R. Commons argued that wage competition not only lowers wages, it also selects for the unfit races. “The competition has no respect for the superior races,” said Common, “the race with lowest necessities displaces others.” Because race rather than productivity determined living standards, Commons could populate his low-wage-races category with the industrious and lazy alike. African Americans were, for Commons, “indolent and fickle,” which explained why, Commons argued, slavery was required: “The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man . . . [I ]f such races are to adopt that industrious life which is second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion. … ”
For these progressives, race determined the standard of living, and the standard of living determined the wage. Thus were immigration restriction and labor legislation, especially minimum wages, justified for their eugenic effects. Invidious distinction, whether founded on the putatively greater fertility of the unfit, or upon their putatively greater predisposition to low wages, lay at the heart of the reforms we today see as the hallmark of the Progressive Era.
Published in General
The minimum wage is the quintessential progressive program: It has disastrous effects, but liberals will never disavow it because it makes them feel good about themselves. Not, to be sure, because of its disastrous effects. No, the minimum wage makes liberals feel good about themselves because they think it will help “the poor.” But it doesn’t. But they don’t actually care whether or not it helps anyone. You see, it makes them feel good about themselves. In the end, that’s what is important to liberals. Feeling good about themselves.
Henry Hazlitt wrote (in 1946) in Economics in One Lesson:
Jon Gabriel wrote about the harm of a minimum wage here:
I had not been aware of this background. Thanks for posting.
My first three jobs all paid less than the then-prevailing minimum wage. They were part-time jobs for neighborhood stores while I was in high school. By mutual agreement, I was paid in cash and the government was none the wiser.
The Hazlitt quote is right on the money. Minimum wage laws, to the extent they are enforced, do nothing other than criminalize employment of would-be workers whose services are worth less than the statutory minimum.
Most workers benefit by market mechanisms, earning well over the presumed minimum wages in their localities. But new, lower skilled job-seekers are deprived of benefiting openly from the only competitive advantage available to them – a willingness to forgo some wages temporarily in return for getting the experience that will allow them to compete more effectively in the future.
This public policy is simply insane – and as noxious as some of the motivations of its earliest proponents.
Jim,
The more we learn about the progressive-eugenic-racist movement that started around the turn of the century and continued in full force through the thirties, the more we come to despise this mentality. The Hippocratic oath says “first do no harm”. We need a political Hippocratic oath. Convinced of the scientific truth of their blatant prejudice these meddlers did immense damage.
Today we have Man Made Global Warming, Low Cholesterol Diet, Green Energy Jobs…and on and on. More and more pure prejudice masquerading as science.
Regards,
Jim
This is fascinating. Thanks. I’m not surprised, but I had not specifically heard this before, and I’m saving this article to pull out next time my air-headed liberal friends post things on Facebook about the minimum wage.
The great thing about the original progressives is that they were open and honest about what the were trying to achieve.
I “get it” but the voting progressive liberal democrat and their audience will not. If we can’t put the message in a pop song it won’t matter. JMO
Justin,
OK if that’s what it takes. I’m no good at composing pop songs or country western songs but I’ll try my hand at the title to get you started. How about:
“The Ballad of Margaret Sanger and the KKK”
Go get your 12 string and give it a try.
Regards,
Jim
NLRB wants fast food franchises to unionize.
Raise minimum wage and require fast food workers to pay into SEIU. Who gets hurt first? Low income workers or middle income franchise owners?