There are not enough well-qualified journalists willing to work for $8 an hour. We know this because there are very few (if any) experienced journalists working for this wage. The New York Times and other newspapers deal with this shortage by paying journalists considerably more than $8 an hour. By contrast, the NYT tells us that many employers want to relax laws penalizing them for hiring undocumented workers because "they grappled, even in an economic downturn, with shortages of low-wage labor." In a market economy, the response to shortages is higher prices, or in this case higher wages. While it is understandable that employers do not want to pay higher wages, just like most of us do not want to pay higher gas prices, that is the way a market works. If they cannot afford to pay higher wages, then in a market economy, they go out of business, just as tens of millions of inefficient businesses have gone out of business as the economy has grown over the last century. It would be helpful if the NYT would apply some basic economics to its discussion of this economic issue.
--Dean Baker
