Bonus Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on September 1, 2017
… is from page 267 of the late Benjamin Rogge’s 1971 essay “The Welfare State against the Negro,” as this essay is reprinted in A Maverick’s Defense of Freedom, the 2010 collection of Rogge’s essays that is edited by Dwight Lee (original emphases):
[L]et me read to you a statement from a man of somewhat different basic persuasion [than Milton Friedman], who says that the Wages and Hours Law – that is, the minimum wage law (this is really the Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1938) “tends to spur mechanization by raising wages. It goes without saying that the Negros are, and will continue to be, the main sufferers in such a development.” This man in his book goes on to document this by pointing out the great number of job losses that could be traced directly in the late 1930’s (and from an earlier experience with minimum-wage-setting under the NRA in the mid 30’s) to minimum-wage-setting. The job losses in the South were concentrated particularly among non-whites. Now who is this man? This is from Gunnar Myrdal’s book An American Dilemma, a book that many believe to be the truly seminal work in defining and outlining the tragic race problem of this country of ours. And Gunnar Myrdal is by no means a compulsive conservative. He is, on the contrary, a lifelong socialist and economist-sociologist from Sweden, and his conclusion is precisely the same as that of Milton Friedman.
DBx: Myrdal (pictured above) shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic Science with F.A. Hayek.
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