It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [30]
The government can be counted upon to interfere with any contractual relationship it hates or fears. Congress has wielded its interstate commerce power to create a federally mandated minimum wage. Minimum wage directly affects the poorest members of the economy, and while this is precisely the intention, the results happen to be completely contrary to these intentions; at least the intentions of the few good-hearted politicians. Many ignorant lawmakers assume that poor people will make more money simply because a law raises the lowest wage an employer can pay a poor person. However, since the poorest members of society tend also to be the least skilled members, if the minimum wage is set above the level of production that a poor person can achieve with his current skill set, then he will never get a job; and the higher the minimum wage, the higher the barrier poor people have to jump in order to gain employment.
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If a person’s skill set is valued at five dollars an hour by an employer, this valuation will not change just because the government implements an eight-dollar minimum wage. What will happen is this person will not get the job; what employer will hire a worker who will actually generate a negative return? So, instead of a poor person having the opportunity to hone his skill set and learn the valuable lessons of hard work that would make him more employable while raising his value, feeling of accomplishment, and the wage he can command in the future, this poor person is rendered unemployable and forced to live a substandard life on the welfare dole because of government-mandated minimum wages. Since many poor teenagers do not possess adequate access to a decent education (as a result of the terrible public school system as discussed in chapter 11), they will suffer the most.
These teens are at a severe disadvantage when they face competition from middle- and upper-class teenagers who have access to better educational systems and who are also able to present themselves better while on interviews. The main weapon a poor inner-city teenager would have in this situation would be the willingness to work for a lower wage; this way he could increase his chances of successfully competing against the middle- and upper-class teens for employment by giving prospective employers a cost-saving incentive. Once he gained employment, he could learn useful skills, demonstrate his true worth to the employer, learn how a certain business works, build a resume, and command a higher wage in the future. However, since government restricts the ability of an individual to choose how much his own labor is worth, he is forced to remain unemployed, never getting an opportunity to learn very important working skills. This is all, of course, supposedly in the greatest interest of the general welfare.
Conclusion
The Interstate Commerce Clause has become an extremely formidable weapon, one which Congress uses to assault our individual commercial liberties and steal our property every day. If Congress is allowed to use this power to regulate food that we grow in our own backyards and consume in our kitchens, there is no limit to its power. Every behavior can now be taxed and regulated by the federal government, and this is something that must be stopped. We have seen examples of how government restrictions and takings have destroyed houses, apartment complexes, businesses, as well as the entire American economy. We have seen how these same restrictions on private property made housing unaffordable for the poor and the middle class; we have seen restrictions cause extreme poverty amongst the most marginalized members of society. When will this end?
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It is no wonder the American economy is no longer the strongest economy, with the most productive and innovative people in the world. America, just like Europe at the end of the two great world wars,