And Rightly So

April 8, 2011

Walter Williams is one of the most entertaining authors on the Right. He's really more a libertarian than a conservative. When I used to be able to listen to Rush Limbaugh -- back when I was staying home with my little boy, who's in high school now, so that's a while back -- I used to look forward to the times when Walter Williams would sub for Rush. Rush is great, but Williams was even more of a treat to listen to. And besides, his taste in music was so much better. (In the opinion of this daughter of Memphis, Tennessee, anyway.)

But Williams's new book, Race and Economics: How Much Can We Blame on Discrimination is not a hoot. Williams still writes in an entertaining way, and he manages to squeeze some gallows humor out of his subject. But the history and economics lessons he offers here are deadly serious. Williams makes the case that the dire economic problems of a large proportion of our black population are the fault of the minimum wage and other constraints on a free labor market.

He's got water-tight evidence and arguments. Confronted by the evidence that a minimum wage inevitably yields unemployment, especially among the very people who find it hardest to get work, you're tempted to say it's all another example of unintended consequences. There go the liberals again, hurting the very people they're trying to help.

Except Williams shows that the minimum wage has not always been intended to help the least fortunate. As a matter of fact, it has quite often been proposed for very different -- even opposite -- reasons, as when John F. Kennedy complained that Massachusetts farm workers couldn't compete with the cheap labor of blacks who were migrating to New England from the Jim Crow South.

Now I doubt that any American today actually favors the minimum wage for racist reasons, despite the fact that it demonstrably hurts black Americans. But the fact that openly racist arguments have been made for it in the past -- including by South African whites during the apartheid era -- puts the minimum wage in that odd set of policies that seem to be favored by the Left for strangely different and unrelated reasons over time.

Take population control. Originally, it was all about eugenics. WASPs like Margaret Sanger were worried that the unfit would outbreed the fit (i.e., themselves). But even when eugenics had been completely discredited by Hitler, population control kept right on being a favorite cause of the Left -- only for entirely new reasons. Now it's about women's choices, "reproductive health," and global warming.

It's about control. Apparently some folks will never give up the idea that an Act of Congress can make a living wage for all workers appear out of thin air, or that we can improve the world by controlling "population" -- i.e., people.

And then of course you're inevitably frustrated when your plans don't solve the problems. That's where a big part of the eugenic impulse in the United States came from in the first place. In the early 20th century our population at large was getting richer and healthier and more law-abiding as American prosperity grew. But some people -- backward folks in the hollows of the mountains in Virginia, say -- seemed to be getting left behind. So the do-gooders applied clinics and social work and various other kinds of imported uplift, only to discover that some populations were particularly resistant to all those cures. At which point, it began to occur to the do- gooders that they could fix the problem by stopping those populations from continuing into the future -- with involuntary sterilization.

It's a lesson in how very important it is not to be 100% hell bent on fixing other people's problems at any cost -- lest at some point it occur to you that the only practicable way to get rid of the problem is to get rid of the person. Pro-choicers say, "Every child a planned and wanted child." Nobody wants to be unwanted. But if you should happen to be unwanted, is it really better to be dead?

Nobody wants a badly paying job, either. Would you rather have no job at all? Williams makes the case that that's exactly what happened to black Americans in the years after World War II, when we first had an effective minimum wage. The employment rate of black Americans fell, and their economic well-being has never recovered since. The motives behind the minimum wage legislation were mixed. Some Congressmen voted for it for explicitly racist motives. Others were thinking of protecting their constituents from competition. Some believed the government could give everybody a free lunch. But the results were devastating, whatever the causes.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com