Socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro announced in August a massive and immediate increase in the country’s monthly minimum wage — from 5.2 million to 180 million bolivars, an increase by a factor of 35. This is the equivalent of increasing the federal minimum wage in the United States from $7.25 to $251 per hour.
In consequence, thousands of Venezuelan businesses unable to pay the new wages closed, and the stores that remained increased prices. In the end, inflation soared higher than 61,000 percent, according to the Cato Institute. These results have been disastrous, and the failure of the minimum wage increase easily debunks the American Left’s calls for a higher minimum wage in the United States.
Read the full op-ed in The Federalist here.