To the Editor:
I expect more from the paper of and about Rhode Island business. Your article (“Bills seek minimum wage hike,” June 11) spends way too much time quoting the author of the bill and her advocates, and not nearly enough time putting this tripe into the trash can where it belongs.
Rep. Charlene Lima talks out of both sides of her mouth. Her main argument for raising the minimum wage is that people cannot support their families on the lower wage. Yet, when David Carlin [of the Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce Coalition] proposes to qualify workers as “supporting their families,” his proposal is dismissed by Lima as “ridiculous.”
I think you know what is ridiculous. I wish you had presented more and better support for the other side of this argument.
Too many people in this state – including businesspeople – don’t understand the economics of this situation and therefore think with their bleeding hearts. As Dwight R. Lee, an economist at the University of Georgia, put it in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty in December 1998, the minimum wage, “like any price floor, creates a surplus” – in this case, of workers, leading to unemployment.
This is some of the information that I wish had been presented.
Providence Screw Co. president
