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IPFS News Link • Minimum Wage

The LA Times's Fallacious Article on the Minimum Wage

• https://www.fff.org by Jacob G. Hornberger

Petro-Cohen said that if employers aren't forced to pay a minimum wage, they will end up paying their workers subsistent wages, or worse. To support her position, she quoted a labor economist at Berkeley named Sylvia Allegretto: "It will be a race to the bottom like we've never seen before." Allegretto added that desperate workers would be forced to accept unlivable wages.

I wrote a response to Petro-Cohen's piece in which I expressed sorrow for college students whose parents pay a lot of money for their kids to be taught this type of economic nonsense. I pointed out that the minimum wage actually locks out of the labor market everyone whose labor is valued in the marketplace at less than the minimum wage.

But at least Petro-Cohen has an excuse — she's a college student. The op-ed editor at the LA Times does't have that excuse. By this time in life, he or she should know better. Not only did the op-ed editor accept Petro-Cohen's piece for publication, he or she left it prominently displayed on the paper's website for around two or three weeks after publication.


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