Since employers can't pay their workers what they believe the labor is worth, businesses can't afford to hire as many people. It is especially hard for small businesses (1). Minimum wage is argued to be "unfair" to employers who can't afford to pay it and to workers who are okay with working for a lower wage. "Let's suppose there's a teenager whom you as an employer would be perfectly willing to hire for a dollar fifty an hour," Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman said in an interview in 1973, when the minimum wage was $1.60. "But the law says no, it's illegal for you to hire him at a dollar fifty an hour. You must hire him at a dollar sixty. Now, if you hire him at a dollar sixty, you're really engaging in an act of charity.… That's something few employers, quite naturally, are willing to do or can afford to do without being put out of business by less generous competitors”