Sen's reflections on rationality had the effect of making me reconsider not my objections to a legal minimum wage, but my grounds for them. It is tempting to regard such legislative interference as an irrationally costly way of achieving a reduction in poverty. But reflection soon leads one on to endless complications. For instance, how do you evaluate the poverty of those forced out of jobs by a sizeable minimum wage against the higher wages of those who retain jobs? If you want to help the latter by ensuring that unemployment pay is at least as high as the minimum wage, what are the incentive effects on economic performance of paying and financing such a dole? On the other hand, if one prefers the apparently more rational course of in-work benefits to top up the pay of those incapable of earning a conventional minimum, one has to ask what effect this will have on pre-benefit market pay and also on the work incentives of those who have to finance the top-ups? In the end one is led to look for an impossible-to-achieve model of the whole economic and social system.

It is surely more straightforward to take the 'process' route and to say that a legally enforced minimum wage is a breach of my freedom to make a contract with another person. This is not acceptable when adverse third-party effects can be offset through social-security top-ups which are a reasonable procedure whether or not their pure economic 'optimality' can be proven. It is the great value of Sen's book that he tempts one to investigate fresh examples and to realise that the world is a more complex place than it might appear to the supporter of an ideology, even one's own.

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