

Also implicated were several founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science, including socialists George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice Webb, and her husband Sydney Webb. The latter once said that "twenty-five percent of our parents […] is producing 50 percent of the next generation. This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration; or, as an alternative, in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews." For him and for others, it was necessary to reduce the fertility rate of "lesser" populations while increasing the fertility rate of their betters.



This included US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who upheld a statute of sterilization of the "mentally feeble" by the state of Virginia in his infamous Buck V. Bell ruling. However, reducing their fertility rate was apparently not sufficient. In his judgment, Holmes stipulated that the reasoning behind the reduction of the fertility rate through sterilization "fails when it is confined to the small numbers who are in the institutions named and is not applied to the multitudes outside." Thus there was a need for more aggressive policy to reduce the chances of survival of the feeble.

Raising the (Colour) Bar Sydney Webb defined the part of the population that he saw as "problematic" as the "unemployables" and said that the capping of work hours and the minimum wage would have the social benefit of eliminating these so-called unemployables. Contrary to Marshall and Pigou, Webb actually saw disemployment as the desired effect of the minimum wage. The idea was that a high minimum wage would shield the "deserving" workers from competition by the unfit by making it illegal to work for less than a certain amount. If wage-determination was left to the market, the unfit would be able to find work, even if badly paid. Even if they were considered incapable of outdoing their superiors, they were capable of "under-living" them because of a biological predisposition.



In the United States, this was especially aimed at the black community for fear that they would be able to replace existing workers at lower prices and thus receive wages on which they could subsist. Irishmen, Asians, and Italians were also among the "unemployables" in the United States. In the United Kingdom, the Irish were the main target, especially of Sydney Webb.



So even if there was a social cost to the minimum wage through less employment and lower output, it was outweighed, as the former president of the Association of American Economists A. B Wolfe said, by the elimination of those "who are a burden on society." A similar logic applied to the capping of work hours, the Immigration Restriction Act (which increased quotas for "race importation") of 1924 under President Coolidge that was advocated by Irving Fisher, and the regulation of working conditions. It always came back to the necessity of excluding certain population groups so they would not lower the genetic makeup of a community and foster its decadence and destruction.



Since World War II, with the horrors of Nazi Germany, eugenics has completely disappeared from the mainstream academic community. Academic papers like the Journal of Eugenics, Eugenics Review, and Applied Eugenics have disappeared, and the Eugenics Society is less than a shadow of its former self. However, some of the policies they proposed, like the minimum wage, remain alive today. The minimum wage is today presented as a tool for providing anyone with a decent wage, regardless of racial origin, and its level is always calculated by government officials so as to produce the least possible distortion of employment. Still, when analyzing ideas, it is worth remembering who first bandied them about, and their reasons for doing so.



