I'm explaining it through logic because statistical correlation is especially complicated and difficult to tease out in social science. You can't take a snapsho

I'm explaining it through logic because statistical correlation is especially complicated and difficult to tease out in social science. You can't take a snapshot of one city, pre and post minimum wage and definitely conclude that the change (or lack of change) in unemployment is due to the minimum wage. Here's a few things to consider: There are more people being paid under minimum wage than there are being paid minimum wage [0]. The unemployment effect of a price floor could be partially offset by a larger number of people being pushed to below-minimum wage jobs (presumably under-the-table). The minimum wage isn't changed randomly, often hire minimum wages get imposed on higher income cities. There are other factors that happened between pre-min wage increase and post-min wage increase. Expectations of wage increases are often implied in current conditions. For instance, if you do that math that you can open a business and make 10% profit margin with 50% of your expenses coming from min wage labor, you would know that your profit margin is complete wiped out with a 20% increase in labor cost. You know that it is likely that min wage will go up rather soon, you will not bother opening the business. And so on... In your corn example, sure, we don't know what would happen if a price floor of corn at $10 were mandated (assuming the market price is less than $10). But I think we can be pretty certain that the amount of corn demanded would drop. Similarly, at a price ceiling below the market price, the quantity demanded will rise, although the quantity supplied will drop, causing a shortage. Look at Venezuela where price ceilings exist for many products. [0] http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/archive/characteristics-of-minimum-wage-workers-2014.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/archive/charact...