Solution to Unemployment Found: Kill the Unemployed

[Draggingtree]

Solution to Unemployment Found: Kill the Unemployed

By Ryan McMaken

Friday, November 7th, 2014

That was the solution proffered by eugenicist progressives during the 1920s and 1930s. At least, that was their preferred option. Frank Taussig admitted that we “have not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform [the unemployed] once and for all, but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.”

 

Many leftists today deny that minimum wage laws increase unemploymentamong the least skilled and most disadvantaged workers. Among many early progressives, however, it was fully admitted that minimum wages cause unemployment, and this fact was to be used to effect good eugenicist social policy. In “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era” in The Journal of Economic Perspectives by Thomas C. Leonard, Leonard examines how the minimum wage was used to separate the “worthy” workers (i.e., those who could earn a “living wage”) from those unproductive workers who should be sterilized.

http://bastiat.mises.org/?p=13232