I remember it well: working hard during those hot Georgia summers. Memory tends to preserve certain things whole, like insects caught in amber, perfect and irretrievable.

My first job was at Cherokee Country Club within one of those tidy, self-important suburbs that ring Atlanta like a string of pearls on a woman who takes herself too seriously. I would rise before the light had even begun its slow negotiations with the dark and make my way to join the waiting: teenage boys shuffling and yawning, and old Black men who had been at this gig long enough to have stopped expecting anything particular from the day.

We stood together in that peculiar democracy of the pre-dawn, all of us equal in our idleness, watching for a bag. There were days when the bags never came, and we went home with nothing but the morning air and bruised patience. There were also days when we carried 18 holes, then 36, legs going rubbery on the long fairways. And there were still other days—the good days, the almost-proud days—when we lugged two bags at once, one to a shoulder, shuttling between players like a small and harried diplomat, privately grateful whenever two wayward shots landed close enough together that we didn’t have to run to each one separately.

Then came the summer of Josh. Dear Josh, who approached a sledgehammer as some boys approach a first love: with total, uncomplicated devotion. We were in construction, which is a generous word for what we mostly did: destruction. We opened up walls, pulled things apart, found out what buildings look like on the inside where no one else is looking.

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There’s satisfaction in demolition that the more refined pleasures of life seldom match. We took that hammer to the sheetrock with genuine joy. We even, memorably, took it to the toilets, swinging with a degree of enthusiasm that doesn’t pause to ask questions. The project manager found us afterward. He was not pleased. It turned out that certain old toilets, whose flushing mechanisms had been grandfathered in before the environmental regulations arrived to spoil everything, were collector’s items: valuable, sellable, apparently much sought-after by a particular type of person online. We had, in our exuberance, destroyed what the market considered treasure.

Oops.

But I can’t say I was sorry. Those were gilded summers, when a boy could work and sweat and break things and call it a living—and mean it, and be right.

This summer, however, seems to have produced a bumper crop of solemn lamentations over the alleged disappearance of the teenage summer job. Legacy publications appear determined to wring their hands over the purported loss. The chorus has grown so loud and monotonous that I long ago stopped paying it any mind. But, lest anyone suspect exaggeration, I took a few minutes to consult the ever-obliging oracle of Google and gathered several representative specimens from the recent press: see here, here, here, and here.

Congress has left the federal minimum wage unchanged at $7.25 per hour since 2009. The initiative has migrated to state capitols and city halls, where lawmakers continue to pursue divergent approaches to labor policy. According to the National Employment Law Project, 19 states and 49 cities and counties raised their minimum wages by the beginning of 2026, and 88 jurisdictions are expected to implement increases before the year’s end.

The case for these increases is always presented as a matter of compassion. Inflation has pinched household budgets. Rent is higher. Groceries cost more. If someone works, we are told, he ought to earn a “living wage.” Now here’s a sentiment that sounds humane because it seeks an admirable end. But good intentions have never repealed the law of supply and demand.

A wage is not merely an expression of moral worth. It is, among other things, a price. And like every other price, it communicates information. Raise it by legislative decree above what the market would otherwise bear, and buyers purchase less of it. Labor is no exception. When the government raises the minimum wage, employers do not suddenly discover hidden vaults of cash. They respond the way people always respond to higher prices: they buy less, they substitute, they automate, or they become more selective about whom they hire.

The first people to pay the price are almost always those with the least to offer on paper. Teenagers are not less valuable because they are young; they are less experienced because they are young. Their first job is both a paycheck and an apprenticeship. It’s where they learn to arrive on time, deal with impossible customers, accept criticism without sulking, and discover that work performed poorly has an annoying tendency to come back for a second attempt. Those lessons cannot be learned from TikTok, from a classroom, or from another well-intentioned government program. They are learned by working.

Thomas Sowell put the matter with characteristic clarity in Basic Economics:

Those who are idled in their youth are of course delayed in acquiring the job skills and experience which could make them more productive—and therefore higher earners—later on. That is, they not only lose the low pay that they could have earned in an entry-level job; they lose the higher pay that they could have moved on to and begun earning after gaining experience in entry-level jobs.

Sowell notes that only about 3% of American workers over the age of 24 earn the minimum wage, underscoring what should already be obvious: minimum-wage jobs are designed chiefly as stepping-stones, not destinations.

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Sowell also demolishes one of the more persistent myths surrounding youth unemployment. The dramatic divergence between unemployment rates for Black and White teenage males, he observes, emerged only after the minimum wage was substantially expanded during the 1950s. The conventional explanations—he lists “less education, lack of skills, racism”—cannot account for this change because those disadvantages were, if anything, more severe during the earlier period when Black teenage unemployment was significantly lower. The variable that changed was not the young men themselves, but the legal price of hiring them.

That’s the tragedy buried beneath all the sympathetic headlines bemoaning the dearth of teenage summer jobs. The same political culture that mourns its decline often applauds the policies most likely to hasten it. We congratulate ourselves for making entry-level work more lucrative while simultaneously making entry-level workers more expensive to employ.

Alas, I think back on those Georgia summers with something that has curdled, over the years, from mere fondness into genuine grief. No economist would have mistaken me for an indispensable employee. I was slow. I made mistakes. I destroyed a row of toilets that possessed, as it turned out, a market value I had catastrophically failed to appreciate.

But somebody gave me the chance to become useful before I had demonstrated that I already was. That unspoken wager, extended across a counter or a construction site to a boy who had not yet earned it, is what a first job actually is. It’s less a paycheck than a declaration of faith—faith that the fumbling, unhurried, occasionally destructive creature before you will, in time, amount to something. We’ve spent decades congratulating ourselves on our compassion for workers while methodically pricing that act of faith out of existence.

The teenagers waiting in the dark before dawn deserve better from us than that.