… is from Charles Lane’s most-recent column in the Washington Post; in this column – which is motivated by Adam Cohen’s new book, Imbeciles, about the U.S. Supreme Court’s support in the early 20th century for state-sponsored eugenics – Lane nicely explains how that which intellectual elites regard as “scientific” can be, in reality, quite unscientific as well as evil (link added):
A good companion volume to Cohen’s is “Illiberal Reformers,” by Princeton’s Thomas C. Leonard, which describes how some Progressive era economists actually made eugenicist arguments for early minimum-wage laws. Raising the wage floor would encourage employers to hire only the most productive workers, who would prosper and propagate, while “unemployables” exited the labor force and got “treated.”
Well, at least the eugenicists, whose ethics were disgusting, were correct in their economics about the minimum wage.
