Hiking the minimum wage is feel-good humanitarian idea that’s guaranteed to hurt actual humans
J.D. Tuccille writes:
There’s probably no more popular way of patting yourself on the back for doing good while actually harming people than advocating for hiked minimum wage laws that forbid people to accept work that pays below a legally mandated floor.
When you raise the price of something above what people are willing to pay, people buy less of it, or else they pass the costs down the line, when possible. This isn’t exactly a revelation; it’s one of the older known economic realities. Unfortunately, there’s always been a certain portion of the population that insists that labor is different and that you really can make people more prosperous by decree. But yet more recent evidence suggests that hiking the price of hiring people works just like raising the cost of everything else. This means that the recent craze for minimum wage laws has not turned out, after all, to be a genius plan for filling bank accounts.
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