minimum wage: You got the "epi," front end, now all you need is the "phany," the back end!

What the World Looks Like to Someone Who Doesn't Understand Economics - Cafe Hayek

See what I did there?! Heh.

More after the break.

You got the "epi", front end, now all you need is the "phany," the back end!

What the World Looks Like to Someone Who Doesn't Understand Economics - Cafe Hayek

See what I did there?! Heh.

"EconLog commenter Jon (who is not Jon Murphy) read with disapproval this comment by EconLog commenter John hare:

Minimum wage is an attempt to extract by force that which one is unable to earn by right.

Jon responded; his response is reproduced below in full:

Exactly! We have an underclass of people who, left on their own, would be very unlikely to earn a living wage by right (and, of course, the current minimum wage is not a living wage). So what do you suggest we do with these people?"

Epiphany requires both the easy front end and the more difficult back end. There is no epiphany without "phany." Jon gets the front end, the fact that minimum wage earners "would be very unlikely to earn a living wage  . . ." He has no idea what to do with it, but believe the minimum wage will rectify this social problem, and apparently believes that although these workers are either not, or barely, worth the current wage, employers will pay them an even higher wage. He believes in Unicorns. At least the minimum wage Unicorn. This Unicorn allows government officials to pass legislation requiring a minimum wage, (leap of faith right here) and employers will have to pay the minimum wage to the employees. Apparently, he believes it is possible for employers to pay people who do not make the business more in value than they cost. 

Back to Don, "Judging from this comment (and from some of his other comments at EconLog), Jon doesn’t even bother to consider the possibility that the minimum wage might not raise incomes in the way that he supposes that it does and that its proponents claim it will."

Whut?! It's possible the Unicorn is dead?! Mon Dieu! 

I love the way Don thinks! 

"Another error is revealed by Jon’s question, “So what do you suggest we do with these people?”  Even if it were true that the United States has lots of people who “left on their own … would be very unlikely to earn a living wage” – and if it were also true that John hare and every other opponent of the minimum wage can offer no good ‘solution’ for how to improve the economic well-being of such people – it does not follow that the minimum wage is, therefore, a policy that will help to improve the economic well-being of such people.  If Smith advises Jones not to drink a gallon of gasoline by pointing out to 65-year-old Jones that drinking gasoline will, contrary to Jones’s stated belief, not only not turn Jones again into a 25-year-old man but will instead kill him, Jones would be mad – and illogical – to respond by asking rhetorically: ‘So what do you suggest I do to turn myself again into a 25-year-old man?’  Not all problems have solutions, and certainly the failure to offer a solution to a problem does not imply that the proposed solution currently under consideration will work or should be tried."

Jon, don't bother buying the ethyl, just drink the cheapest grade, it'll kill you just as dead.

"Jon’s response to John hare also suggests that Jon believes that prices and wages are rather arbitrary numbers the only function of which is to determine  how a fixed-sized economic pie is sliced.  Raising the minimum wage will (apparently in Jon’s view) cut bigger slices for low-skilled workers by cutting smaller slices for business owners and others.  There is in Jon’s comment no evidence whatsoever that he is even aware of (much less that he has a response to) the concern that the minimum wage prices out of jobs the very workers that Jon understandably seeks to help."

It's Unicorn, I tell ya, Unicorns all the way down.

Turtles all the way down - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Does anyone know the initial reasoning for the minimum wage? Don gets to it in the end. Does anyone know why South African unions spent so much time and money lobbying for a minimum wage for black workers?

It wasn't altruism.