The effort in many cities and states to raise the minimum wage has not proven to be good for the country, according to syndicated columnist and economist Peter Morici.
In an interview Tuesday on Newsmax TV's "Newsmax Now," the business professor at the University of Maryland argued "it's best to let wages be set by the market."
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"In San Francisco where we've had some considerable experience now with a dramatically higher minimum wage, a lot of lower price restaurants have just had to shut down," said Morici, who is also a Newsmax Finance Insider.
"There are places where you can get away with it like lower Manhattan. If you just raise the minimum wage around Wall Street . . . those guys make so much money they're not going to care whether the price of the McDonald's meal goes up by a dollar or is equivalent in a lower-price restaurant."
"But in most parts of the country, people do have alternatives to low-price restaurants and similar services and they take them," he continued. "Also, go to a movie theater and see how few people work in them these days. That's a higher minimum wage."
Morici debunked the idea the economic pie "can't get much bigger very quickly," and "the only way we can accomplish any justice . . . is to recarve the pie."
"If you just let the pie grow quickly and have a free for all, everybody gets some pie," he said.
Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist. He tweets @pmorici1
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