“The Welfare State against the Negro,”

Don Boudreuax writes:

Bonus Quotation of the Day…… is from page 267 of the late Ben Rogge’s 1971 essay “The Welfare State against the Negro,” as this essay is reprinted in A Maverick’s Defense of Freedom, the 2010 collection of Rogge’s essays that is edited by Dwight Lee:

Let me read you another one.  “Minimum wage rates: these often hurt those they are designed to help.  What good does it do a Negro youth to know that an employer must pay him $1.60 per hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?”  By the way, we need not just say Negro youth there; what good does it do any young person to know that an employer must pay him $1.60 if that is the fact that keeps him from getting the job at all?  Where is this statement from?  From the seventh edition ofEconomics by Paul Samuelson.

...Proponents of the minimum wage are enemies of the least advantage people in society.  That most minimum-wage proponents do not realize the cruelty that their pet policy unleashes does not alter the reality.

The above originally appeared at Cafe Hayek.