art credit: The Tunnel Wall
The Washington Post reports that the state
of Maine’s House voted on a bill to reduce the minimum wage for tipped restaurant
workers. An
earlier Cleveland Tea Party blog reported on Mayor Frank Jackson’s hopes of increasing
the minimum wage for City of Cleveland employees.
Today, Thomas Lifson at American Thinker has more on the minimum
wage debate:
Minimum wage laws are a perfect example of feel-good statism, in
which the professed goal is noble, but the execution inevitably fails and makes
things worse. The state can no more repeal the law of supply and demand than
it can the law of gravity.
But don't tell that to the
Seattle City Council, which just commissioned
a new study intended to get the answer it wants, from a scholar who
has contended, in effect, that supply and demand don't really work at the
bottom of the wage scale. The wonderful thing about working with numbers
is that by choosing baselines, time periods, and sample bias, you can find
almost whatever you want. As a graduate student who got a Ph.D. in
sociology, I saw this clearly and was sickened by people openly proud of the
ways in which they got to the conclusions they wanted for ideological reasons.
Nobel laureate Ronald Coase famously summed it up: "If you torture the
data long enough, it will confess."
Will somebody tell Mayor Frank
Jackson?
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