I am almost certainly missing important nuance as an outsider. One thing I find interesting about US right wing politics (the US right, is I think a more unique

I am almost certainly missing important nuance as an outsider. One thing I find interesting about US right wing politics (the US right, is I think a more uniquely American camp, then the left) is the way "rhetoric" is possible more accurate than policies. Economically, the US right is very vocal and ideologically clear about its beliefs, economic liberalism. The politicians, pundits and supports cite fundamentals quite a lot. The efficiencies and incentives of free markets, with policies relating fairly directly to economic textbooks (of agreeable persuasions). I don't want to stigmatize by calling it "economic ideology" as this implies an irrationality that I don't mean to imply, but ideology is more or less what I mean, sans value judgements. Its unfortunate that has become a bad word. This writer is calling it "economistic" and means a strong expectation that the basic economic models like supply and demand are predictive of the real world effects. So, he expects the minimum wages to result in unemployment. This may be the real rationale for him, but I think the wider political weight of this is only there because it dovetails with other (US-sh) freedom concepts. IE, I think the idea that two people can decide on a wage contract without outside intervention has an appeal beyond just it's economic effects to many in that political camp. In any case, my point is that this kind of theoretical grounding and economic fundamentalism (again sans-value judgment, I just mean they often tie policies to theoretical fundamentals) is something in recession in other places and political camps. The big examples are the bastard descendants of communism, arguably the most confidently touted and complete economic-political big-T Theory in history. For example, take "labour-socialism" the big central-left camp in europe. Once upon a time, they believed in labour unionism a variant of socialism. Not just as a means to an end, but as a fundamentally grounded ideology. The way to make industry thrive, create prosperity for workers, etc. It still exists as a real-politic hodgepodge of policies and rhetoric roughly espousing old labour values, but not really labour unionism ideology. It's not comparable to the economic liberalism of the US right. The Chinese communist party was once… communist. 5 year plans. means of production, the whole shebang. The remaining left in Europe and elsewhere is very non theory based. The have strong a social and economic goals and values, but not really a big theory about how everything works best. There is no consistent, underlying economic theory like the US right has. It still holds a lot of socialist values and even We get back to words like idealist or fundamentalist that have negative connotations, an interesting thing in itself. I think that's what this article is arguing for, essentially. Fundamentals say minimum wage increases yield unemployment. Trust in the fundamentals.