Editor’s Note: This is part 2 of an open letter from Prof. Howard Baetjer to a friend who commented on one of his Facebook posts about minimum wage laws. You can view part 1 here.Baetjer and his friend, Adam, look at the minimum wage issue from very different perspectives, so Baetjer wrote an open letter. […]
A small group of workers walked out at Walmart on Black Friday 2012, and the company has been for a few decades now a leading emblem of what is supposedly wrong with the modern global economy. Shouldn’t Walmart just be more generous? Not necessarily. First, the managers of corporations are answerable to their shareholders. This […]
Does the “Made in Bangladesh” tag on your shirt—which could just as easily be read as “Made by Child Labor”—make you feel bad? There’s no question it should make us reflect on the incredible standard of living that we enjoy. But as Texas Tech Professor Benjamin Powell explains, we shouldn’t feel bad or unethical for […]
Mr. Sanders: In last-night’s debate you said: “I was on a picket line in the early 1990s against Nafta, because you didn’t need a Ph.D. in economics to understand that American workers should not be forced to compete against people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour.” I’m told that you’re a principled man who […]
What do we learn if immigrants lower the wages of American high school dropouts? That we should restrict immigration? No. We shouldn’t. First, if immigrants reduce the wages of high school dropouts, it sends a very clear message: don’t drop out of high school. Indeed, this is how people have responded to competitive pressure from […]
A student recently asked me why unemployment remains so stubbornly high, especially for lower-skilled people. Here’s an adaptation of my answer. No one can know for sure the precise causes of unemployment; the economy is a fantastically complex system, like an ecology but still more complex, so unemployment is sure to have a variety of […]
What might be reasons to restrict immigration to the United States? Can we justifiably refuse entry to immigrants on the fear that they will receive welfare but not work in return? Would that, then, justify kicking American citizens out of the country if they do not meet a certain standard? Give us your two cents […]
This week, another round of fast food protests occurred in major cities nationwide. The protests are part of the broader “Fight for $15” movement that seeks to more than double the existing federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. While such a policy sounds like it could help low-wage employees, it would actually end up […]
With presidential contenders like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders making a fuss about foreign laborers coming to the country and depressing wages or murdering our women and children immigration reform has once again moved to the front lines of presidential politics. Have you ever wanted to cut through the demagoguery and fear-mongering and get plain […]
Below is an excerpt of a post that appeared at Forbes.com on August 28th, 2015. According to an April 2015 symposium on the effects of illegal immigrants in the Southern Economic Journal, illegal immigrants actually raise wages for documented/native workers. Meanwhile, rules preventing illegal immigrants from getting driver’s licenses raise our car insurance premiums and […]