The Eugenics Plot of the Minimum Wage | Foundation for Economic Education

Do note the 1890-1931 historical contexts, when support for eugenics was widespread across the political spectrum. The history portion of this and the quotes are interesting, but using this as an anti-minimum-wage argument in the present amounts to guilt-by-association.

The minimum wage has a dark, racist history. And the great irony is that its malicious intent is unwittingly being realized today.

Most of these writings would have been completely forgotten but for a seminal 2005 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Thomas C. Leonard.

“Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics,” Leonard explains, “believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the ‘unemployable.’”

One hundred years ago, legislating a price floor on wages was a policy deliberately conceived to impoverish the lower classes and the undesirables, and thereby to disincentivize their reproduction.

Source: The Eugenics Plot of the Minimum Wage | Foundation for Economic Education by Jeffrey Tucker