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Trigger warning: This video has adult language (and great content).
One of the many wrong-headed arguments made by proponents of minimum wages is that employers can simply raise the prices of their outputs in order to cover the higher labor costs they must bear due to legislated minimum wages. People who offer this argument never pause to ask: when the prices of outputs made with disproportionately large numbers of low-skilled workers rise relative to the prices other outputs, what happens to the quantities of those outputs bought by consumers? The answer, of course, is that the quantities of those outputs bought by consumers fall – a reality that reduces employers’ demand for minimum-wage workers.
Despite lots of wishful thinking (often buoyed by naïve empirical analyses), there is no escaping economic reality even when the economic reality that people wish to escape bears upon low-skilled workers.