What about that minimum wage?

My bloghopping has had me at "The Liberal Avenger" site, and I've already critiqued one of the bloggers.

Here's a critique of a different blogger, "Ape Man," who makes a case for raising the minimum wage "until it reaches its highest economically sustainable level"--he suggests $7.50/hr at minimum.

Now, I do want to emphasize that it's a pleasure to debate the issue in terms of plausible reasoning compared to the other blog post I pointed out.

The basis for Ape Man's argument appears to be the supposition that the U.S. job market has significant aspects of a monopsony (control of demand). That claim seems very hard to justify given low unemployment. How can employers control demand when the supply of workers is low? Realistically, I mean.
Ape Man trots out the U.K. as a model for the success of raising the minimum wage. I double-checked unemployment figures for the U.K.--about as low as for the U.S.

Low unemployment exerts market pressure for higher wages (supply and demand). Go much above where the market would go by itself, and increased unemployment should result.

I'll reproduce my reply to Ape Man here, since a delay in seeing it appear gives me some doubt that it will appear.
Ack--seem to have lost it (drat that extra cut-and-paste).

In brief, I wrote as above that monopsonic conditions do not seem to apply broadly during times of low unemployment, and that establishing a wage floor is a fundamentally inflationary strategy.

I'm predicting that Democrat economic policies will result in inflation and unemployment, btw. It's almost unfair to predict the latter, of course, since unemployment is at very low levels currently. The Dems get a pass until they hit 7 percent. That'd be a pretty big jump in two years.
No doubt they'll blame Bush for it in time for the next election!


Update: (11-11-06) I'm not quite sure what's up with the "Liberal Avenger" site. I posted there the other day but my comment did not appear--though there's no stated indication from what I can see that the comments are screened by an administrator.
Given the lack of a stated screening policy, I tried (yesterday) posting the same comment again, thereupon receiving the message that I had tried to post a duplicate message.

We'll see what's up.