Why are libertarians against raising the minimum wage to $15.00? Do they expect the working poor to subsist on $7.25 forever and somehow not be a burden on taxpayers?

. . . as answered on Quora. . . .

  1. Because it is based on coercion, threat of force.
  2. Because a legal wage minimum does not raise wages, it prohibits employers from hiring workers at rates less than set, so it is de facto an unemployment technique — which some libertarian aficionados of history note was why many of the early minimum wage laws were in fact enacted, to harm the employment opportunities of “undesirables.”
  3. Because libertarians know that, ultimately, wages are paid to workers on the basis of productivity (marginal productivity, to be exact) and that regulations and prohibitions like minimum wage laws are attempts to get something for nothing, and never work out as billed. That is, such regulations have “unintended consequences” — though how “unintended” those consequences are is in doubt, because some folks malignly do promote these regulations knowing about their negative effects. (Many politicians advance bad ideas merely to appease the rubes.)
  4. Because libertarians believe that people should aim to be more productive, not seek for Salvation from the State.
  5. Because libertarians know that most people in the workforce who start out at the lowest wages in the marketplace do not stay at the low rates, but increase their remuneration rates as they develop skills.
  6. Because libertarians know that competition among employers for good workers do in fact reward workers with higher wage rates than the minimum.
  7. Because libertarians expect people to aspire to better themselves and the lives of their families, not depend on others for charitable or forced aid. People with low productivity shouldn’t start families, for instance, but wait until they have proven themselves capable of productive living before engaging in unprotected heterosexual intercourse and launching babies onto the world — babies that somebody’s got to take care of.
  8. Libertarians realize that if you make it easier to live without producing, you will get more non- and under-producers. So “burden on the taxpayer” is one of their concerns. And making some people unnecessarily unemployable, by minimum wage regulation and by unemployment subsidy, is no way to decrease this burden.
  9. Because libertarians generally prefer distributed responsibility to centralized and socialized responsibility, knowing that the latter turns people into dregs of society, economic leaches — and minimum wage laws set higher than the productivity of the potential workers does increase unemployment and prevents the lowest-skilled workers from developing working skills in the most effective manner: by actual labor.

I could go on and on like this, but you get the idea: minimum wage laws don’t work as political activists pretend they do. Intent does not determine the utility of a law, outcomes do. Libertarians have wit enough to see the reality of such programs. And they are more than familiar with inconvenient facts about these de facto employment prohibitions. They understand that such regulations actually hurt the employability of the lowest skilled workers. And will likely regale you with statistics about how African-American teen unemployment, for example, increased over the decades with each effective increase in the minimum wage.

But most voters regard legislation and regulation as magic. So they simply deny truths repeatedly demonstrated. Economic policy is not a means to an end, for many voters, but rites in the cult of the omnipotent state, which they worship instead of a deity, and in defiance of reality. The state is not omnipotent. It has limitations. It does not work by magic, no matter how cultic its adherents prove themselves to be — as routinely revealed in the perennial nonsense over minimum wage laws.

Oh, and why not raise it higher than it is now, to $15/hour?

Well, a federal regulation of this nature would do more harm than a local regulation in a wealthy region, for some regions of the country can bear only very low wages: increasing the minimum would disemploy more people in Arkansas and Missouri than in New York or San Francisco.

The higher the minimum is raised, the greater the number of workers who would be negatively affected.

This is why no one in his right mind demands a $1000 per hour “raise” for “everybody” using this method.

Only fools make a bad policy worse.

twv