>The first thing that happens, for example, when a law is passed that no one shall be paid less than $106 for a forty-hour week is that no one who is not worth

>The first thing that happens, for example, when a law is passed that no one shall be paid less than $106 for a forty-hour week is that no one who is not worth $106 a week to an employer will be employed at all. You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. Ok, I can't let logic like that slide by. I'll just list off why it is totally junk reasoning: - Assumes that worker is getting 'what he is worth to an employer' currently. This would assume that the worker and the employer are on an equal footing, both in power (workers can be coerced and intimidated into lower wages), and intellect (workers can be tricked and bamboozled), and in information (workers know less about the going rates for labor than an employer, if only because employers have lots of employees, but an employee has only one employer usually). - Assumes the worker is optimally employed to maximize earnings. Lots of people work in fields because they fell into that sort of work, and learning a new language or new skills is hard or unnatural to them. Being fired from such a low paying job may make developing other skills a necessity. Think of the guy working at McDonald's who could be trained to be a lineman for the electric company or a truck driver, or the truck driver who could (if he had more ambition, and was willing to give up an income for a few months to go to trade school) be a mechanic on jet engines. - If everyone is held to the same minimum wage, everyone's costs, therefore the price they charge, goes up. Charging more money lets them afford the more expensive workers. - If workers get more expensive, long term investments in mechanization become more attractive. This lowers costs in the long run, and creates jobs that pay more than the original menial job. All that extra money everyone has because the price of everything is so low due to mechanization means they have plenty of money to spend on luxuries they would never have previously considered, this is called 'Starbucks' and employs lots of people. - Even if the worker does lose his job, modern unemployment insurance schemes will make that relatively painless to the old 'free market' system of going to debtors prison or indentured servitude. A-priori economic arguments are bullshit. It is perfectly possible to prove convincingly that in a system without a government private security firms would enforce law and order. We can be convinced of this because we don't know all the reasons this fails in practice, due to our imperfect understanding of the world. The fact that in every single instance that there has been a lack of a functional police force for more than a few hours things go totally batshit insane should render any such 'convincing' argument totally absurd.