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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

The minimum wage is an effort to increase the welfare of those whose skills are in excess supply.

No, that is entirely unrelated to why it was created.

It was created because The Deep South was unwilling to pay a black man "a white man's wages" and blacks were routinely paid about half what whites made for the exact same job. The policy was initially a failure. Businesses in the South fired blacks en masse rather than pay a black man the same as a white. This did not change until WW2 caused very serious labor shortages.

Minimum wage was an antiracism policy aimed at forcing the Deep South to get more in line with the rest of the nation and stop having Jim Crow bullshit linger on in the form of literally paying blacks half as much as whites. It was intended to put a stop to that practice.

Whatever they do with it now for REASONS, the original federal minimum wage law was passed for the above reason.

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> Minimum wage was an antiracism policy aimed at forcing the Deep South

Could you offer some support for this claim? There is a recent book called "Illiberal Reformers" that seems to suggest exactly the opposite: that minimum wage policies were put in place with the intent of putting minorities out of work (rather than raising their standard of living).

See some of the quotations here:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/12/thomas_leonard.html

""" The low-standard or undercutting-of-wages part of the theory, got its start with the violent activism of white Americans against Chinese immigrant workers. The title of a pamphlet published by the American Federation of Labor trenchantly captured the heart of the claim: Meat versus Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive? If wages were determined by living standards rather than by productivity, then the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon could not compete with the Chinese worker accustomed to eating rice.

Professor Woodrow Wilson, in his popular History of the American People, preferred the same theory of low-standard races undercutting American wages, adding a fillip of racism to cement the notion that race explained the low standards. White laborers, unable to "live upon a handful of rice for a pittance," could not compete with the Chinese, "who with their yellow skin and strange debasing habits of life seemed to them hardly fellow men at all but evil spirits, rather." """

I read a really excellent and well researched book on the history of the deep south some years ago. It began with trying to define "The Deep South" and listed out the many conflicting definitions. Some definitions include Florida, others do not. Some include Texas, others do not. Some include states on the northern edge of the area, some do not.

It laid this out very credibly. It had a very respectable list of sources. The author talked about getting original copies from someone who was old of some of the papers and what not that he referenced.

Sadly, I cannot remember the name of the book. If I can find it, I will let you know.

Also, I have read a different theory than the one you cite for why Asians ended up working on, for example, the rail lines that were laid across the U.S. It involved the fact that they drank tea, thus they boiled their water. This protected them from getting diseases that often laid up white workers in harsh settings where the water was not always safe to drink without boiling.

The racist explanations you list sound to me like explanations created by people living through the fallout who were expressing their anger rather than genuinely analyzing the situation.

Those lesser races included Irish and most Catholics as well, blacks were literally a whipping boy used both as cheap labor and way to keep lesser white races in line. End of the day people are assholes.

Many of these things can be read in different ways. The modern interpretation is to read everything through a racial lens, but I don't think that captures the essence of the issue. The initial minimum wage laws really targeted sweatshops and child labor. It was viewed then that these employers had way too much power over labor and were depressing wages overall.

Where to draw the line between anti-Chinese antagonism and pushing out predatory business is subjective. But I think if you look at the circumstances surrounding the issue and the laws, you'll find more of the latter.

Ah, TIL. I'm not American though. Minimum wage isn't just an American policy.

Minimum wage policies exist outside of the Jim Crow southern United States.

They, in fact, exist outside the United States, period.

Interesting retro-rationalisation, but patently false.

How Deep South are we talking? The first and second nations in the world to introduce minimum wage laws (New Zealand and Australia, both are pretty South) weren't ever slave states, about 40 years before the US caught on. It was introduced for welfare reasons - to ensure people had a living wage. A few other places had minimum wage before the US as well.

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