Discussions about minimum wages are often tedious. On his blog, Greg Mankiw uses a very simple argument to counter recent claims for higher minimum wages:
Presumably, the president’s economic team must believe that the adverse employment effects become sufficiently large at some point that further increases are undesirable.
The fact of the matter is that a higher minimum wage ultimately surpasses the productivity of some workers. At this point the least productive people will lose their jobs. So unless we know everyone’s productivity, any claim for a higher minimum wage
- either assumes that all workers create enough value per hour (to make it profitable to hire them at the minimum wage)
- or neglects that the weakest members of the society will no longer find a job.
Swiss Economist 
[…] this month I wrote about the minimum wage law (here). Adding to this, Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, argues that […]