Wage Controls and Unemployment

Walter Block on wage controls from The Case for Discrimination:

"Further, any proposal that artificially raises the salaries of a given calling beyond its productivity level threatens it with unemployment. But equal pay enactments are always couched in terms of raising female incomes, never reducing those of males."

What this means is that when wages for a given service are artificially raised, the demand required for that increased input factor are absent, and the resulting decline in demand due to higher market costs will lead to, among other things, increased unemployment.

It is at times depressing, that so many downtrodden, or simply naively optimistic, still believe that such intervention can have sustainable benefits. The reality is that rent seeking efforts tend to have short shelf lives.