Leftists want to treat the minimum wage as a magic bullet. Shoot it off, and it magically reduces poverty. The problem with any magic bullet, though, is that it comes down somewhere. With enough margic bullets, or by affecting enough people with the magic, it will hit somebody. Leftists try to claim that, because you can't ever find the bullet, that the bullet somehow disappears.
For a small enough minimum wage increase, you can't identify anyone whose employment got destroyed because their labor is no longer worth the minimum wage. You can't even pull out the loss of that job from all the other changes in the work force. But like the magic bullet, it has to land somewhere. If you can't identify the person who got hurt, did they not get hurt?
posted at: 06:26 | path: /economics | permanent link to this entry