Job creation and the minimum wage

Hat tip to Hot Air.




Orphe Divounguy finishes his presentation by challenging minimum wage supporters with a more advanced application of minimum wage logic. Why not increase the minimum wage to $100 per hour or the like?

I tried a similar challenge with a liberal at a FaceBook page some weeks ago. What if we gave everyone a government job paying $1 million per year? I pressed "Garrett Fitzgerald" for an answer over a period of time. This was probably his best attempt:

"it would wreck the money system...money wouldn't be worth anything...The idea of a stable system is no one is too rich and on one is too poor...and you have a big middle in between."

Fitzgerald had an accurate sense that employing everyone with million-dollar jobs would devalue money, but his secondary reasoning  suggested that he had no real idea why that was the case.  Instead of reaching the conclusion I tried to draw him toward, that the value of money is a function of the (market-determined) value of work, he came up with this fantastic idea that a monetary system needed to avoid having too many rich or poor people.  Naturally I subsequently pointed out to him that, relatively speaking, million dollar salaries for all effectively eliminated "too rich" and "too poor."  The "big middle in between" was guaranteed about as much as possible in a realistic scenario.

Fitzgerald never reached the conclusion that I tried to draw him toward, but he did eventually try to dodge the discussion of economics and other issues by using FaceBook's "ignore user" application.

Do liberals tend to be somewhat clueless about economics?  I think so, though the linked study does have its flaws.