Category: minimum wage

EA Ross — The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but can underlive him

SOURCE [This article needs proofreading.  Feel free to check the original and send a corrected version to us] DR. EDWARD A. ROSS RESIGNS. The Head of the Department of Economics Leaves the University at the Demand of Mrs. Stanford. Dr. Edward A. Ross, head of the Department of Economics and Sociology, and one of the …

Continue reading

The Minimum Wage As Means to Exterminate Defectives: Taussig, 1911

SOURCE: Frank Taussig, Principles of Economics, Volume II, 1911.  Pages 299-300. As with legislation on hours, factory conditions, and the like, a compulsory minimum wages rate might serve simply to regulate the plane of competition. All employers would be affected alike; no one could undersell the others by cutting below the established rate. There would …

Continue reading

Child Labor Laws as Eugenics Policy

Source:  Dr. Frank a Fetter, Cornell University, in a discussion of “Western Civilization and the Birth-Rate”, as found in The American Journal of Sociology, 1907, page 619. The paper mentions but one recent social change which tends definitely and positively to reduce the families of the unskilled classes, namely, child-labor legislation. Such laws as these …

Continue reading

E.A. Ross and the Difference in Races

Source: E.A. Ross, discussing ‘Social Darwinism’  in American Journal of Sociology 12 (March 1907), 715. Strongly attracted as I am by the hopeful and noble views that have been expressed, I cannot but feel that Dr. Wells’s is right.  The theory that races are virtually equal in capacity leads to such monumental follies as lining …

Continue reading

Sydney Webb: The parasites should not be allowed to compete as wage-earners, for it prevents natural selection from working…

Sydney Webb in Industrial Democracy (regarding the minimum wage) – 1920  The problem of the Unemployable is not created by the fixing of a National Minimum by law. The Unemployable we have always with us. With regards to certain sections of the population, this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but of social …

Continue reading

Mass Extermination and ‘Lethal Chambers’ Widely Considered by Eugenicists in America, England, and Germay

Long before the Nazis implemented the ‘Final Solution,’ American and English eugenicists had talked often of the use of ‘lethal chambers’ to deal with the pressing problem of the ‘unfit.’  You can imagine Hitler’s surprise, when, after acting on precisely what elites in America and England had long been advocating for, he was perceived as …

Continue reading