The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression.
Under these inflationary pressures many of the industries and small businesses employing marginally trained or unskilled workers will be forced to cut back on the number of those employees or go out of business. The very worker that the Federal minimum wage was intended to aid will find himself out of work.
I am vitally concerned about the thousands of teenagers and young adults who will either lose their jobs or be rendered unemployable in the unskilled labor markets as the result of increasing the minimum wage to $2.50 or more per hour.
The question of the minimum wage goes beyond the immediate problem. It strikes at a basic underpinning of our democratic system. It touches on the ability of individuals to enter freely into contract without coercion and without arbitrary restrictions for mutual profit. Have we so soon forgotten that the American Revolution was fought in part because of such restrictions? Have we forgotten that there is a correlation between a free market economy and the amount of personal freedom enjoyed by the inhabitants of a country? I certainly hope not. What we are accomplishing by setting a minimum wage is restricting the ability of persons to freely contract for their services and, in so doing, effectively limiting their opportunities to achieve economic well-being.
But where will employers obtain the money to pay for that increase? It is unrealistic to assume that somehow the increase will be squeezed out of profits….In plain fact, the burden of an increased minimum wage will fall heavily on those least able to bear it. The fringe employers, the unskilled worker, the young and the handicapped are those who will be priced out of the job market.
[The Fair Labor Standards Act] constitutes a step in the direction of communism, bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism.
[The Fair Labor Standards Act] will destroy small industry….[these ideas are] the product of those whose thinking is rooted in an alien philosophy and who are bent upon the destruction of our whole constitutional system and the setting up of a red-labor communistic despotism upon the ruins of our Christian civilization.
[The Fair Labor Standards Act] would create chaos in business never yet known to us.... It sets an all-time high in crackpot legislation. Let me make it very clear that I am not opposed to the social theory.... No decent American citizen can take exception to this attitude. What I do take exception to is any approach to a solution of this problem which is utterly impractical and in operation would be much more destructive than constructive to the very purposes which it is designed to serve.
Pages
- « first
- ‹ previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
