Don Boudreaux’s ongoing, excellent coverage of the minimum wage issue

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE:

No one has more steadfastly, consistently and vigorously brought economy sanity, logic and reason to the issue of the minimum wage law government-mandated wage floor that guarantees reduced employment opportunities for America’s teenagers and low-skilled workers (especially minorities) than George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux. On his Café Hayek blog, Don has for many years regularly covered the minimum wage issue with his wisdom, wit, and keen economic thinking, and I applaud his ongoing efforts to educate his readers, students and (hopefully, some day maybe) policymakers about an important economic issue.

In several recent posts, Don has emphasized a very important, but usually overlooked or neglected reason that some empirical studies fail to find negative employment effects following increases in the minimum wagegovernment-mandated wage floor that guarantees reduced employment opportunities for America’s teenagers and low-skilled workers (especially minorities). That reason has to do with the fact that the minimum wage has been in effect for almost 80 years since the Fair Unfair to Unskilled Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938, and it’s been increased 27 times since then. Therefore, the government’s mandated market-suppressing, artificial wage for low- and un-skilled workers has been around for such a long time, and it’s been raised so many times, that the distortionary effects of the minimum wage have long ago been “internalized” by employers who hire unskilled workers. Don explains that phenomenon in a recent blog post where he schools Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein about his “simply poor economic journalism,” and provides this additional commentary:

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