Thomas Sowell Quotes

Literally, if we took away the minimum wage - if conceivably it was gone - we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.

A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.

The concept of minimum wage is crazy, if you really stop to think about it. If $8 an hour seems right, why not $20 an hour? If it's coming by order of the government, why stop at any level? Why not just say everyone should get what Gates gets?

The problem with one single minimum wage is that you don't allow for younger people, who are less skilled and maybe more easily pushed out of the job market, or that the minimum wage should vary for different regions.

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

The minimum wage was enacted in 1937 during the Great Depression and it has been increased 16 times. It's a well-established economic policy to help families.

Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable.

On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We've got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers - and there could be a lot of them - will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.

Wal-Mart has always paid low wages, or, as Sam Walton put it, 'as little as we could get by with at the time.'

Congress has not raised the minimum wage since 1997. The minimum wage is now at its lowest level in 50 years adjusted for inflation.

You get paid more at McDonald's than you do under the existing minimum wage.

Like all other contracts, wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.

I don't know of a single economist who disagrees that when you raise the minimum wage, you kill jobs for the poor.

If you go from $7 to $15 in a very short period of time, potentially that could have a negative effect on some economies because that is a very big jump. And you're saying to businesses that employ a large number of minimum wage workers, your payroll is basically going to double. That could have a negative impact. It would have to be studied.

Minimum wage laws have never worked in terms of having the middle class attain more prosperity.

I have said, on a number of occasions, that we could have a lower minimum wage or no minimum wage.

Low pay is a serious problem, and its victims need a genuine solution.

I have serious concerns with the discussion around minimum wage because it drives up costs, and it could harm jobs.

Especially for the young and the lowest-skilled, minimum wage becomes a toll that prevents many from entering the work force and gaining the skills that can make a low income or middle class worker a high income worker. This is so obvious that one wonders why liberals keep championing the minimum wage cause.

The impact of a minimum wage depends on how high it is to average wages. If you have too high a minimum wage, it will hurt job creation, and you will have negative job effects.

No one seriously believes that cutting the minimum wage is good for workers.

If you think about $7.25 an hour, that's $290 a week. It's inhumane to have that kind of wage.

I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows. When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market. That is the economic reality that seems, at least so far, to be missing from this discussion.

The value of the minimum wage shouldn't be eroded, and it has been.