Why Teenagers Can't Find Work; J.V. LaBeaume

G.O.A.L. is a model of private initiative appli cable to many colleges and universities across the United States. George Roche, quoted in the Detroit Free Press, says,"I would think [G.O.A.L.] has great potential. I don't see why we couldn't have this on most college campuses.... It certainly should have a place in higher education. If it doesn't, I'll be disappointed in higher education." The Phoenix Gazette echoes Roche in a January 20, 1990, editorial: "The Hillsdale program is a modest but worthy effort to rekindle interest in common purposes. It sets an example for other schools to follow." Hillsdale's program is an innovative way to finance the college education of some of our young leaders while imparting to them one of the most important truths articulated in the academy: the sanctity of free individuals, exercising their talents to improve themselves and the lives of others. G.O.A.L. Director Duane Beauchamp sums it up: "G.O.A.L. combines education and action. It pro motes the best instincts of young people. And it places the responsibility for community service where it should be placed, not on government, but on the moral conscience of the individual." D Why Teenagers Can't Find Work by John v: LaBeaume D uring the summer of 1990, despite two months of intensive searching, I was unable to find employment. I could locate no employer willing to exchange $3.35 per hour, the "training" minimum wage, for my unskilled labor. In essence, I was legallypriced out of the market.

This means that prospective employers and I were prevented, because of the minimum wage, John LaBeaume is a high school senior in University City, Missouri. He did find work in the summer of1991. from agreeing to mutually beneficial exchanges. After a few weeks of fruitless search, I was willing to work for one dollar per hour, which most well meaning minimum wage proponents would declare "unjust." One dollar per hour, however, was one dollar per hour more than I earned that summer. Prospective employers deemed my services, quite rightly I suppose, worth less than the mini mum wage. Anyone who hired me for the "train ing" wage most likely would have lost money. An 454 THE FREEMAN • DECEMBER 1991 employee's output, after all, must exceed the employer's total costs if the employer is to earn a profit. The cost of hiring, we must remember, exceeds the employee's wage. Other factors such as Social Security contributions, workers' compensation, unemployment payments, insurance, uniforms, and parking increase the cost. It also is expensive to comply with the many regulations imposed on employers by the state.

Particularly expensive is compliance with child labor laws. These often-archaic rules restrict the number of hours a young person may work, when he may work, as well as the types of jobs he may seek. They drive up the costs of hiring unskilled youth, thus giving older competitors more lever age with prospective employers. Perhaps I would have been more fortunate had I been looking for work in the summer of 1989 when employers and employees often skirted minimum wage and child labor laws, resulting in more jobs for minors. However, in early 1990, then-Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole launched Operation Child Watch, a crackdown on the vio lators of minimum wage and child labor laws, dur ing which hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines were levied on employers defying these laws. In the summer of 1990, the hypersensitivity of employers was evident as they attempted to com ply with these laws to avoid a $1,000fine for each violation.

The Productivity of Freedom The defense offered by minimum wage propo nents, including unionists interested in reducing competition from people willing to work for less than their artificially high, union-mandated wages, is that without the minimum wage, minors would be "forced" to toil as "slave labor." This argument trivializes the seriousness of the concepts of force and slavery. A person is forced when another physicallycompels him to act; this is hardly the case here as the employee is free to leave his job at any time. Slaveryis the state of one human livingin the possession of another, and slave labor is forced labor without compensation; this is not applicable here because some compensation is made, how ever low, and neither party owns the other. Extremely low wages won't occur in a free mar ket because of the low productivity that would ensue. A worker is unlikely to produce with quality if he decides that he isn't receiving compen sation that makes the job worth his while-if he accepts such a position at all. Thus it isn't in the employer's interest to offer wages so greatly una greeable to the employee. And if he does, compet ing employers will be quick to offer higher wages so as to hire the worker away.

Minimum wage and child labor laws exclude unskilled young people from the labor market and increase teenage unemployment. At the same time, they undermine the rights of free association and exchange, and deny the lesson of self-responsi bility which comes from getting that first job. D F or the economy as a whole, there can be no Santa Claus, no "free lunch." Society must pay for what it gets. The payments thus made are the incomes of the recipients. Most of us are on both sides-paying and receiving. On one side, we want the amount to be large; on the other side, we want it to be small. Each of us presumably tries to do the best we can, to make the best settlement possible with what he has, in getting income and then in using it. The greater our freedom to make the best bargains, the better in general will be the results. No one wants to pay others more than their services are worth, and freedom to reject demands for overpayment reduces the likelihood that we shall be forced to do so. In turn, the broader our range of freedom, the larger our opportunities to get the most that our services are worth to others.

-C. LOWELL HARRISS IDEAS ON LIBERTY $ 455 The Great American Epic by Davis Keeler W hy is it that the Civil War seems to be the great American epic? Why isn't it the American Revolution? The win ning of the West was an epic deed, but it stretched over so many years and had such a shifting cast of characters that it may lack the focus needed for a great tale. But does the story of the Revolution have some similar shortcoming? It is a story of disparate peoples who left their ancient homes in search of freedom, crossed a per ilous sea to live in an unknown wilderness, and came together to cast off the yoke of a great power and establish a nation that was to become the shin ing hope of mankind. This is not skimpy material to work with. The problem can't be dialogue, for this was a highly articulate bunch, who have left us a great mass of eminently quotable tracts, sermons, speeches, documents, pronouncements, and decla rations, many of which are models of English usage.