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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Opponents of a minimum wage need only believe that increasing the price of a thing tends to proportionally decrease the demand for that thing. This is simply a statement of the law of supply and demand, which is (though weaker) the economic equivalent of physics' F=MA.

Proponents of a minimum wage need to believe that in this particular case, raising a price does not proportionally decrease demand. While this may be true (economics ain't physics), the burden of proof lies with the proponents, since it would be a contradiction of probably the most well established "law" of economics.

If you feel that the data in this and similar studies are inconclusive, to the extent that you respect the discipline of economics, you should oppose a minimum wage.

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> Opponents of a minimum wage need only believe that increasing the price of a thing tends to proportionally decrease the demand for that thing. This is simply a statement of the law of supply and demand

No, it's a contradiction of it; in conventional economics, a price floor has no effect on supply or demand, but reduces quantity traded iff the market clearing price without the floor is below the price floor. (One of the most annoying recurring things, to me, on HN is people making economic arguments and confusing either “supply” or “demand” with “quantity traded”, especially when discussing the effect of price controls which result in quantity traded not being the intersection of the supply and demand curves.)

Your conclusion lies on the assumption that rational economists must oppose any measure which decreases demand.

This particular decrease of demand is of work hour and jobs, and thus an increase in misery of particularly vulnerable people. If an economist is both rational and compassionate, they would need to believe that such price fixing has benefits that outweigh the increased misery.

I'm not familiar with those offsetting benefits. If they exist, please enlighten me.

Except that there are numerous cases where raising price doesn't proportionally drop demand (it can even raise demand), and very well understood reasons for that.

Pretending that it's a "law" of economics we can blindly apply to any situation is absurd.

I used scare quotes to indicate that it isn't an actual law, which is also why I said that it's weaker than something like F=MA and that economics ain't physics. Then you chose to ignore all of that to accuse me of pretending otherwise.

I don't deny that there are exceptions, I just claim that they _are_ exceptions, and that therefore the burden of proof is on the one arguing that a particular case is exceptional.

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