The House of Lisport: ​Special Items

Felix Frankfurter… invoked the segregating effects of minimum wage laws to justify his defense of Oregon’s minimum wage law. Frankfurter argued that the states’ police power permitted them to override the individuals right to freely contract in the name of protecting society’s health, welfare, or morals. Because a successful minimum wage sorted “the normal self-supporting worker from the unemployables” (by idling them), it served a compelling state interest in public health. — Thomas C. Leonard (Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era^•)