Sowell paints a picture of himself as having a rather shallow grasp of Marxism, if the narrow experience he describes really changed his mind. I'm pretty sure that there is no principle in Marxism that says that capitalists won't lay people off in response to minimum wage hikes, if only as a way to retaliate against the minimum wage hike. On analogy to something Marx says in _Value,Price and Proift_, Marxists might say there is no _natural_ law that says things must be that way, that rather than laying people off , the capitalists' profits could be reduced.
Assuming that Sowell is smarter than the way he portrays himself, the inference would be that he had another motive than "reasoning" based on the empirical study he mentions to change from "left" to right. In other words, it's a bit idiotic or slick to conclude that the ideas Marx sets out in his many works are false because in Puerto Rico at a certain time ,with capitalism in place, a minimum wage hike was followed by a rise in unemployment. I say it might be slick if Sowell is wanting to move to the right for opportunist reasons as discussed earlier on this thread. He seems to be casting the federal ,wage-and-hour, regulatory agents and unions as practitioners of Marxism. How ridiculous is that ? And then having set up these straw Marxists, knocks them down and moves on to the right. Pleeeassse. At this point , I guess I would have to question what kind and whether Sowell was a Marxist. He sounds more like a "Marxist". He seems to equate liberals and Marxists. When Sowell and the interviewer have the following exchange: What's it like for you on the right? I certainly have met racist Republicans. I ask this question for the Salon readership, many of whom are probably convinced that the Republican party is made up entirely of racists. Sowell: That's not true, of course. It's amazing, for example, how many people on the right have for years been up in Harlem spending their money and their time trying to help the kids, including one whose name would be very familiar to you. But he hasn't chosen to say it publicly, so I won't either. CB: One wonders whether that Republican's generosity will cause a rise in the unemployment rate , since back at the company where the Rep got the ducets to give to poor in Harlem, they might have to layoff some people to pay for the gifts being distributed to those Black ( no doubt) recipients of loving, non-racist charity. Charles -- From: "David B. Shemano" The wonders of the internet. Here is Sowell explaining his shift away from Marxism: http://www.salon.com/books/int/1999/11/10/sowell/index1.html David Shemano Interviewer: So you were a lefty once. Sowell: Through the decade of my 20s, I was a Marxist. What made you turn around? Sowell: What began to change my mind was working in the summer of 1960 as an intern in the federal government, studying minimum-wage laws in Puerto Rico. It was painfully clear that as they pushed up minimum wage levels, which they did at that time industry by industry, the employment levels were falling. I was studying the sugar industry. There were two explanations of what was happening. One was the conventional economic explanation: that as you pushed up the minimum-wage level, you were pricing people out of their jobs. The other one was that there were a series of hurricanes that had come through Puerto Rico, destroying sugar cane in the field, and therefore employment was lower. The unions preferred that explanation, and some of the liberals did, too. Did you discover something that surprised you? I spent the summer trying to figure out how to tell empirically which explanation was true. And one day I figured it out. I came to the office and announced that what we needed was data on the amount of sugar cane standing in the field before the hurricane moved through. I expected to be congratulated. And I saw these looks of shock on people's faces. As if, "This idiot has stumbled on something that's going to blow the whole game!" To me the question was: Is this law making poor people better off or worse off? That was the not the question the labor department was looking at. About one-third of their budget at that time came from administering the wages and hours laws. They may have chosen to believe that the law was benign, but they certainly weren't going to engage in any scrutiny of the law. What that said to me was that the incentives of government agencies are different than what the laws they were set up to administer were intended to accomplish. That may not sound very original in the James Buchanan era, when we know about "Public Choice" theory. But it was a revelation for me. You start thinking in those terms, and you no longer ask, what is the goal of that law, and do I agree with that goal? You start to ask instead: What are the incentives, what are the consequences of those incentives, and do I agree with those?
