It's interesting that the "market" -- that is the consumers who buy and use the products and services prepared by the minimum wage workers, have almost no say in these discussions.

For example, it's been shown again and again that the price of gasoline is especially price elastic. At $1.25 a gallon it was already a bargain, and at $3.59 people still consider it somewhat of a bargain if it lets them live in a low cost but spacious home and commute to a high wage job. So no one rioted and few people cut back when it came to needed trips. And with the slightest rise in consumer sentiment people headed back to the malls and other optional driving.

The other implicit part of these arguments is that these jobs are optional. That all the boxes to be stacked and burgers to be fried and carts to be pushed could suddenly be done away with or made self serve without complaint.

Is that true?

Actually, this idiotic book is completely untrue. MW raises has killed jobs, as was proven by the experience in American Samoa: http://www.acton.org/pub/commentary/2011…

Not to mention that we can't easily track what MW does to unskilled workers. Those who were hired may keep their jobs in many cases when the state-mandated wages go up, but employers are more likely to hire only experienced and skilled workers, leaving youth and unskilled people without any job.

The fact that youth unemployment correlates with higher MW is proof of that: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/image…

And it is also a fallacy that without MW, we would have widespread poverty. In fact, in "socialist paradise" Sweden, there is no government mandated MW and people still make money thanks to non-government unions.

Paying less than a reasonable minimum wage is basically subsidizing a business with slave labor. You can argue what a reasonable minimum wage is but you can't argue that freezing it forever is feasible when the cost of living keeps increasing.

@2: Supposing that we went to a privatized welfare system of charity, what checks would be in place to protect religious minorities? Also, what is your vision for education?

The problem with Econ 101 analysis is that it assumes a perfect market which has many providers and consumers and in which both can negotiate on prices. The market is supposed to find the point where the supply and demand curves meet and prices should be centered around that spot.

Low-end workers have very limited ability to negotiate for higher wages. What ability they have had historically has been severely limited as unions have been destroyed. So we are dealing with a very asymmetric market where all the negotiating power is on the demand side.

This means that the minimum wage which is being paid to workers is simply not optimal. If workers were able to negotiate they would not accept a full time job for less than a living wage. It behooves the government to regulate this market by setting a price floor at which workers are paid sufficiently that the government no longer needs to subsidize full time workers for basic necessities like food and shelter.

@5: What if the federal government instead demolished "Right To Bust Union" laws nationally, and reasserted the rights of all workers to organize?

could a Marxist possibly believe that any compression of potential surplus value would not prompt some disinvestment and reallocation to the 7% per year equity markets?

" raise the price of something (and a wage is the price of labor), and you depress demand for it."

Therein lays the rub. That labor is also the demand for the product.

Our business/labor negotiating imbalance, our tax code, our credit markets, our social safety net are all to blame for unbalancing the distribution of purchasing power and wealth.

@2 notes "Sweden, there is no government mandated MW and people still make money thanks to non-government unions. " stumbling without comprehension into an example of how the relationship between business and labor are unbalanced in the US.

Sweden doesn't need a minimum wage because the Government and society at large push hard for business to respect collective bargaining.

@4
Religious minorities would be protected by virtue of the non-aggression principal in a libertarian society: They aren't using aggression, so they are left alone. All social safety nets will be voluntary so groups like the Amish won't have to pay into them, much as they do now.

As for education, it has to be said that I, like most libertarians, have a difference between our idea (minarchist society) and reality. We won't get to minarchism in our lifetime probably. So, we're pragmatic. Anything that limits government and maximizes freedom, while not "pulling the rug out from people" or hurting the environment or anything, is good.

So, education should be controlled locally with minimal federal meddling. They could say "by age 18, all students are expected to know algebra 2" and let locals figure out how to do it, but the whole standarized test thing is bullocks.

One of the main problems with education in America is the teachers union, which isn't really a union. I mean, the Ford auto workers union doesn't force the company to build less cars and more trucks: they just worry about their worker's pay and safety. While the teachers union, on the other hand, is the only union that meddles in what the product is (in this case, education)

The best, most realistic thing for America to do is end the teachers unions and hire based on merits and qualification and promote and pay based on performance. There is a great movie about this called "The Cartel" that's available on Netflix.

But I'm fine with taxation funded education for the time being, up to college even. If we just stopped wasting money on the War on Drugs, Wars all over the world for Empire building, corporate welfare, useless government programs etc we'd have plenty left to fund education and still cut taxes while paying down our debt.

And someday, school like everything else will be funded through voluntary taxation and run by the community.

It would be nice to see updated data - empirical studies - since 1997. Yes, despite the rants/complaints about how:

- minimum wage workers aren't the primary earners in their households

- student/teen employment is hurt

- how fewer jobs are created because MW prevents wage-sharing

The evidence is non-existent. In particular, the last nostrum/article-of-capitalist-faith is debunked: employers will not add workers just because they are cheaper - they will only add them when they can no longer get additional productivity out of existing workers and need to expand capacity.

Unskilled workers aren't hurt - quite the opposite: the demand for unskilled labor is low and dropping in our modern economy, that's true, but that's not a function of wages, it's a function of what can be automated/mechanized - robots are always cheaper than people. Yes, elevator operators are extinct, and increasingly telephone operators, etc, but that's not because their MW was too high - it's because we could replace them with mechanization (nowadays software). Despite the bluster, there's no evidence that order taker/fillers at FF joints are being replaced. I've been to a few places where customers do their own order entry, but the line cook (food re-heat & assembly) and baggers/delivery remain.

Instead, the MW sets a floor under all wages. Some of that wage pressure might push through as price inflation, but only after it crams down margins. Alls fair in love and war...cry me a river capitalists.