A new collection of recent columns by my colleague Walter Williams has just been published. It’s outstandingly good!
I just discovered this insightful lecture on markets and trust by Mark Pennington. Delivered in 2011, its length is less than 14 minutes.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley explains why minimum-wage legislation harms the very workers it is designed to help. (gated) A slice:
Politicians like President Obama and civil-rights groups like the NAACP insist that the minimum wage is an effective antipoverty tool. But most minimum-wage earners do not hail from poor households, let alone head them. Rather, they tend to be teenagers or young adults working part time. The majority of poor families in the U.S. have no workers. What they need most is a job, not a raise.
Minimum-wage laws that idle otherwise employable youths are imposing costs on those youths in the form of forgone work experiences. “Finding and keeping a job is a key step in a young person’s transition to adulthood and economic self-sufficiency,” wrote the authors of the Brookings Institution study. “Employment obviously allows young people to cover expenses for themselves and their families, but it also provides valuable opportunities for teens and young adults to apply academic skills and learn occupation-specific and broader employment skills such as teamwork, time management, and problem-solving.”
James Pethokoukis offers reasons for skepticism that we’re in a ‘great stagnation.‘
