If you frequent the General Classroom building, then you have probably seen the petition to increase minimum wage. If the petitioners get enough signatures, they can move on to the next step of getting a minimum wage increase passed into law. I hope they are unsuccessful.
In today’s job market, employers look for people with experience and education. A study by Cato Institute found that minimum wage cuts the number of total jobs available and makes employers more choosy about who they hire.
Since the poor generally don’t have a lot of education, the only hope they have for advancement is in work experience. And actively standing in the way of the poor trying to get jobs and work for a better life seems a little much.
The minimum wage increase hits especially hard on small businesses. The cost of starting a new business is high enough without laws making it harder to hire a necessary number of workers. It doesn’t matter that people may be willing to work for whatever pay is offered, but the government simply makes it illegal to do so.
The black race is one of the most entrepreneurial-minded races on the planet. So it seems strange to me that we would help anyone handicap us in our quest for economic independence. Slavery has been over for some 100 plus years, and we still don’t have the freedom to choose whom we can hire or for what price we can choose to work for.
Minimum wage has been shown – in studies by the Cato Institute, the National Center for Policy Analysis, the Employment Policy Institute and others – to hurt the least-skilled workers and the poor the most. The people who are actually shown to benefit from minimum wage laws are public sector unionized employees.
Minimum wage insults the freedom of people to choose how much a task is worth and the intelligence of people by implying they are too stupid to know when they are being taken advantage of.
Stand up for your freedom of choice and the American dream of self-advancement and fight the minimum wage.