Below is Mitch's response to my post on the minimum wage. The only adjustment I have made is to delete parenthetical references to outside articles and replace them with in-body hyperlinks. I will, of course, be responding in due time.
I’m going to try to respond to particular points made
throughout the blog post, so developing a linear narrative is going to be
difficult. After the comments I will try to give a big-picture account that
ties it all together.
First, I certainly wouldn’t offer up the article I posted as
any sort of thorough or even remotely rigorous critique of minimum wage law.
Nevertheless, I don’t think it is correct to portray the author as failing in
intellectual honesty through a straw man fallacy. The point of the article is
not to demolish minimum wage, but to give some passing remarks and illustrate a
single (although crucial) point. That point is that the law harms members of
the set of people it is purported to help. Although we may claim that minimum
wage raises workers’ pay, and make it seem as if this is a true universal claim
that applies to all workers at the bottom, this is not true. Nor is it
necessarily true that we will be taking this extra pay from the employer. In fact,
with laws such as this, some people win and some people lose, and those people
are both from the low-skilled, low-experience, employee class, not the employer
class. So, according to the goal of the proponents of minimum wage, the policy
is self-defeating.
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