It appears that Arizonans are turning the tables on San Diego. After San Diego imposed a ban on doing business with or official travel to Arizona, citizens of Arizona are canceling their San Diego travel plans. This, of course, is causing some concern in the San Diego tourism industry. A response from San Diego school board President Shelia Jackson, who is sorry people don’t want to come to her city, but still supports her vote to boycott Arizona:

“It’s sad that people would cancel their plans to come here in reaction to that, but I still think we did the right thing,” Jackson told the Union-Tribune. “Certainly, we know how important tourism is to San Diego, and it wasn’t my intent to impact the tourism trade.”

Of course it wasn't her intent to negatively impact her city. Her intent was to impact Arizona. Like most politicians, her problem is that she didn't bother to look past the end of her nose before taking this action. Politicians rarely spend any time or effort considering the possibility of unintended consequences.

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After reading a Walter Williams column on the effect of the minimum wage law on American Samoa, I started thinking about my experience as a cotton picker when I was about 14 years old (I mean manually picking cotton; I was never a machine.). At that time there was no minimum wage law that applied to farm labor and, apparently, no child labor laws. Farmers paid based on level of production rather than by the hour for most farm labor.

The farmer I picked for was paying three cents per pound of cotton picked. I managed to pick about 100 pounds per day so I earned about three dollars per day. Another boy the same age as me could pick about 200 pounds per day so he earned twice as much as I did. It never occurred to me that this was unfair. He was bigger and stronger than me and could put more cotton in his sack before having to carry it to the truck to be weighed and emptied. He also took shorter rest breaks.

What do you suppose would have happened if a minimum wage law required the farmer to pay each of his pickers six dollars per day regardless of their production? I would not have been hired and I wouldn't have made enough money that summer to buy a bicycle and clothes for school. And the other boy might not have picked 200 pounds per day. It would raise other issues like the length of a day and the length of work-breaks during the day.

What if the farmer was a socialist and announced that he was going to add up all of each day's production, divide it by the number of pickers and pay each picker for that amount? That is, pay each picker the same regardless of their individual production. First, the 200-pound-per-day boy and the other top producers would go find another farmer to pick for. Second, animosity would grow amongst the remaining pickers over the level of each picker's production and overall production would decline dramatically. Third, the socialist farmer would be forced out of business because of his inability to get his crop to market.

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