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no longer underbid their white counterparts, meaning that the blacks where the ones who suffered because of the racism.

A similar end result happened here in the US with the first minimum wage law. That's why an estimated 500,000 blacks lost their jobs.

The Cato Institute analyzed the effects of the 1990-91 increases in the federal minimum wage, in a review entitled "Sense and Nonsense on the Minimum Wage" The result of the study? The people who were affected by the minimum wage lost jobs. Unemployment.

"As is true with age, when we divide the population on the basis of education, ethnic group, or marital status, we find that the group with the highest percentage of low-wage workers is also the group in which employment shows the greatest drop." [2]

These facts are hard to argue with. As a matter of fact, a 2003 poll indicated that 46% of economists agreed that "a minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers." 28% agreed partly, and only 27% disagreed.[3] That's almost a 2-to-1 ratio of economists who say that minimum wage laws end up increasing unemployment.

I only wish we could have such consensus on other things.

End Result: Unemployment increased.

In the end, given the options businesses have for acquiring the money to increase the wages, the result is nothing but disastrous. Unfortunately, as it is a lot with economics, the truth gets lost somewhere in a pile of statistics.

Every time inflation goes up, our buying power is decreased. Every time prices go up, someone has to change their lifestyle for the worse. We must remember that every time the unemployment rate goes up to any extent at all, someone's life has been turned upside-down. Poverty is increased.

Poverty puts people in seemingly hopeless situations. Economic strain can and has caused relationship strains which have escalated into divorces, aggrevate alcoholism, bring about drug addictions, encourage suicide, etc. These are real harms against real peopleunsuspecting victims of political law which doesn't take into account reality.

Something's got to give.

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[1] Lawrence W. Reed, Great Myths of the Great Depression Mackinac, Center for Public Policy, 1998
http://www.mackinac.org/ar chives/1998/sp1998-01.pdf

[2] Donald Deere, Kevin M. Murphy, Finis Welch Sense and Nonsense on the Minimum Wage The Cato Review of Business & Government 1995 Vol. 18 No. 1
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regu lation/reg18n1c.html

[3] Dan Fuller, Doris Geide-Stevenson, Consensus Among Economists: Revisited Journal of Economic Review, Vol. 34, No. 4, 2003, 369-387
http://www.indiana.edu/ %7Eeconed/pdffiles/fall03/full er.pdf

Learn more about this author, Shaun Connell.
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