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Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 220-221 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics [2]:

Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount – and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.  Yet minimum wage laws are almost always discussed politically in terms of the benefits they confer on workers receiving those wages.  Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they either lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force.  The logic is plain and an examination of the empirical evidence from various countries around the world tends to back up that logic, as we shall see.

Sowell then goes on to summarize this empirical evidence.

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