Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz has a new scheme. You may recall that a couple of months ago he proposed to lick the problem of unemployment by forcing employers to pay double-time instead of time-and-a-half for overtime. (WW’s logic: employers, rather than pay such high prices for overtime, will reach for fresh workers out of the unemployment pool. Free Market’s logic: you cannot cause an increase in business by raising the price of doing business.)
The new idea is to keep young people away from the labor market by the simple expedient of making them go to school longer. Specifically, Mr. Wirtz would require all students to stay in school not until they are sixteen, which is the age at which, under most state laws, they now quit: but until they are eighteen. That, he says, would remove two million teenagers from the overburdened labor market and, moreover, give them the kind of education which would make them highly employable when they finally do get out of school.
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