Comfortable ignorance

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Apr 22

RE: Minimum wage debate is finally over.  Spectator editorial 12 Apr 22.

It says something about the comfort one enjoys in one’s ignorance when they write that an “enduring shibboleth” among a “certain set” is that minimum wage laws are “pernicious to the public good.”  Include economist Thomas Sowell among that “set.”

Sowell has written about his experience with minimum wage laws as an economist in many of his books written over the last twenty years.  Sowell was a Marxist in the 1950s, but when he did an internship with the U.S. Department of Labor and did a study of the effect of minimum wage laws, he became a convinced believer in the free-market.

Minimum wage laws effectively priced those just entering the workforce without skills out of a job.  This was especially true among minorities because a minimum wage created a large pool of unemployed, unskilled labor which made it a buyers’ market that was disadvantageous to minorities.  The Labor Department looked upon minimum wage as a bureaucratic imperative because its administration is what gave the bureaucrats work! To hell with the effect on minorities!

The perniciousness of minimum wage laws has been well documented and explained by Thomas Sowell; it’s not some “shibboleth.”

But it says something about the comfortable ignorance of Marxists and “scientific socialists” that they can’t adapt their thinking to the evidence.  Sowell was an empiricist before he was a Marxist, and when he saw the failure of Marxism, he changed his thinking to explain the evidence.  He didn’t ignore the evidence because it didn’t fit the theory.

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