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… is from page 223 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics [2]:
The average family income of a minimum wage worker is more than $44,000 a year – far more than can be earned by someone working at minimum wages. But 42 percent of minimum-wage workers live with parents or some other relative. In other words, they are not supporting a family but often a family is supporting them. Only 15 percent of minimum-wage workers are supporting themselves and a dependent, the kind of person envisioned by those who advocate a “living wage.”
Ponder these facts along with the related fact that more than half of all minimum-wage workers in the United States are younger than 25 years old [3]. These facts alone make incredible the allegation that minimum-wage workers are so desperate not to lose their current jobs that one result of this desperation is that employers of such workers enjoy monopsony power over them – monopsony power so real and widespread that government is justified in stripping low-skilled workers of the legal right to compete for jobs by offering to work at hourly wages below those deemed acceptable by politicians, professors, pundits, and popes.