A Parade of Flawed Arguments for Minimum-Wage Legislation →
Don Boudreaux on one of my bête noires, the minimum wage.
Finally, when Ms. Kim writes that “The minimum wage isn’t a pathway to the middle class; it is a safety net to prevent destitution,” she reveals that she doesn’t understand the key problem with the minimum wage – namely, that it causes some workers’ earnings to fall to $0. However economically precarious one’s life might be when paid a positive market wage of less than $15 per hour, that life is far more precarious when paid $0 per hour.
Minimum-wage legislation isn’t a safety net; it’s a knife that shreds the safety net of employment opportunities in the market.
I think there are already people who want work and can't find it, at the current minimum wage. A policy that makes them more expensive to employ, a policy that increases the minimum wage, makes it harder for them to get a job. That seems counterproductive to me.