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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca8Z__o52sk&feature=relat..., enough said.

Minimum wage law may be debatable, but Milton's arguments here are poor. The minimum wage is a trivial amount, and noone holds skills below this rate - I severely doubt that the minimum wage stops unskilled people getting work on the basis of being too high a cost for businesses. Furthermore, increasing unemployment among the youth is based on increased education participation and a richer middle-class, not on the minimum wage being so high that businesses can't afford to employ teenagers.

>"The minimum wage is a trivial amount, and noone holds skills below this rate"

It is probably true that the minimum wage is not a binding price floor in rich white suburbs.

I'm not sure what you mean here exactly, but I think you are implying that rich white suburbs don't abide by the minimum wage when hiring? Alternatively you might be saying that everyone in a rich white suburb manages to make more than the minimum wage. Either way it reeks of ad hominem by playing on the accepted racism of white people as heartless and trouble-free.

Regardless, saying people work below the minimum wage is irrelevant to my point that the minimum wage is sufficiently low that it does not deter people from hiring unskilled workers.

I think he means that fixed-level price floors are largely meaningless in circumstances where the marginal utility of a dollar can vary widely from one neighborhood to the next (neighborhoods that often vary along socio-economic lines, which correlates strongly with ethnicity).

I mean that I have read evidence that minimum wages increase unemployment more in poor areas of the country than in wealthy ones. I'm coding all night at the moment, so I don't have time to look it up. But to say that "noone" has skills to offer the labor market that will clear at a price below the minimum wage is myopic.

Okay, so my argument is that the minimum wage shouldn't increase unemployment at all, because it is so low that any reasonable task is worth more than the low rate the wage is set at. What you say makes sense - if a minimum wage is so high that employers can't afford employees anymore then the poor areas will be hit worst, because the poor areas are the most unskilled.

Minimum wage is important because it prevents businesses that are so inefficient that can't even produce enough value to provide their employees with such a low payment.

Not every business is good. Business that can't pay minimum wage is just wasting people time. That time might be better utilized by some better thought out business.

If you don't agree state your opinion instead of downvoting.

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