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Minimum Wage Laws 117except by paying starvation wages, then it will be just as well if the minimumwage puts it out of existence altogether.” But this brave pronouncementoverlooks the realities. It overlooks, first of all, that consumerswill suffer the loss of that product. It forgets, in the secondplace, that it is merely condemning the people who worked in thatindustry to unemployment. And it ignores, finally, that bad as were thewages paid in the X industry, they were the best among all the alternativesthat seemed open to the workers in that industry; otherwise theworkers would have gone into another. If, therefore, the X industry isdriven out of existence by a minimum wage law, then the workers previouslyemployed in that industry will be forced to turn to alternativecourses that seemed less attractive to them in the first place. Theircompetition for jobs will drive down the pay offered even in thesealternative occupations. There is no escape from the conclusion thatthe minimum wage will increase unemployment.2A nice problem, moreover, will be raised by the relief programdesigned to take care of the unemployment caused by the minimumwage law. By a minimum wage of, say, 75 cents an hour, we have forbiddenanyone to work forty hours in a week for less than $30. Suppose,now, we offer only $18 a week on relief. This means that we haveforbidden a man to be usefully employed at, say $25 a week, in orderthat we may support him at $18 a week in idleness. We have deprivedsociety of the value of his services. We have deprived the man of theindependence and self-respect that come from self-support, even at alow level, and from performing wanted work, at the same time as wehave lowered what the man could have received by his own efforts.These consequences follow as long as the relief payment is apenny less than $30. Yet the higher we make the relief payment, theworse we make the situation in other respects. If we offer $30 forrelief, then we offer many men just as much for not working as forworking. Moreover, whatever the sum we offer for relief, we create asituation in which everyone is working only for the difference betweenhis wages and the amount of the relief. If the relief is $30 a week, for