State Against Blacks

In a beautifully persuasive chapter called "Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly," Williams demonstrates that minimum wage laws hit inevitably at marginal workers who cannot in the circumstances do enough work in a given hour to make a profit for their employers. The consequence of the minimum wage is that nobody will hire people who haven't yet learned certain skills or absorbed certain disciplinary lessons. It is purely accidental that the worst negative effects of the compulsory minimum wage are borne by nonwhite teenagers, followed by non white males in their twenties.