Abolishing the minimum wage will not reduce unemployment

"Most other positions" being almost all. Very few jobs are presently minimum wage. http://www.heritage.org... Effectively 1 in 200 Americans presently has a minimum wage. Even if it were somehow possible to set off a cascading wage spiral, these are not the fellows to do it with. " You cannot judge the production of a worker before employing them" By this argument no business should ever survive. There are rational grounds for expectations about how much one will produce. A worker with a mutation that gives them natural blue skin is all but impossible to replace. Yet no one will employ him if his production potential is less than the salary he demands. A football team can technically replace an All-Pro quarterback with Jeff Blake if they want to. He does the same job. But he doesn't produce nearly as much at it, which is why the all-pro receives a much higher salary. "As for the point that Economics is not Zero sum. It actually is. For one to gain, one must lose. For one to get a position, someone else must not. This drives a race to the bottom for the most desperate of workers." By this argument, the exact same number of jobs should be present now as were present in the Stone Age. The exact same quality too. Positions are CREATED. The better they are filled, the more will be created. If Bill Gates becomes CEO of Microsoft, thousands of absentminded software engineers get jobs too. If one of those absentminded software engineers becomes CEO, Bill Gates does not get employed, and neither do many of the thousands of other software engineers, because capital is being wasted on a business headed by someone who does not have the skillset to head it.. The two sums differ. Eventually the business collapses and gets bought out of course, but this has transaction costs and wastes time that could otherwise be used producing :). You're still stuck on a binary definition, which is the root of the fallacy. Working enough to achieve the normal necessities of life is significantly more than the "everyone works one hour" example. Thus, they would be "more employed" than those people by my definition. Both are defined as "employed" by the traditional definition. But working enough to achieve luxuries on top of that is even more "employed" yet, which your redefinition does not capture, and mine does. The "Everyone works 12 or 16" is not my definition, but the traditional one, you seem to be confused. Abolishing laws which force people to reject volunteers is not a form of force. Offering employment is not a form of force. Increasing "supply," i.e. increasing the number of employable people (without increasing the number of people), makes productive potential higher, and does not at all in and of itself constitute a reduction of employment. Whatever reduction of wages occurs is outweighed by the greater number of people receiving them in this scenario, as economics, again, is not zero sum-- if the government does not stop it from happening, people will continue to produce as much as they can given their personality-- human desires are ultimately unlimited. More people CHOOSING to work more hours, is more employment. More people earning wages is ultimately a huge wage gain for those people. Since economics is not zero sum, those wage gains have to outweigh any fall in the price of the bleeding lower edge of current labor. If something "Starts working backwards" i.e. in the opposite of the manner that was theorized, means that it working "forwards" was, for the purposes of general theory, an illusion, and the people who theorized it as a general phenomena rather than a temporary, going-to-reverse-one (the Keynesians were those people), are wrong. Regardless of whether you find it "Desirable" to "hold you hostage" by refusing to be your slave and only using his talents and the products of those talents when you get something out of it, it is not a situation that is caused by the abolition of the minimum wage, it is prior to the minimum wage and the reason why it is recommendable. Employers (Capitalist is an ideology, not a profession), do not like to be told what to do. The less you tell them what to do, the better mood they will be in. And they are the ones who created the modern world. The modern steel worker has fewer skills than a medieval blacksmith, but a larger standard of living. Every penny of that difference is directly attributable to the greed of those more competent than he, and the fact that in order to fulfill that need they had to offer something better than the worker had before. Nobody is forced to participate in any economy except a state-controlled one. Refusing someone the benefits of what they do not partake in is not a form of force. And rationalproduction is not "Dehumanizing," it is the essence of what "human" means. Sacrificing to the herd, that can be found among cows and ants. I was not comparing employment with leisure time, but the worker's prior profession. The employer, when unrestricted, has the needs of his mind, the mind of a sort that together with others like it created the modern world, driving him to find workers to create what he sees possible to create and thinks worth creating. The common labourer has the needs of his mind, the mind that with others like it (many more like it than like the employer's exist) reached its pinnacle in medieval huts and handmade tools, driving him to find work. Decide for yourselves which drive is greater. The classic example of the teenager (or young adult) is over half of those who presently earn the minimum wage, and probably even more of those who would earn less than it when the minimum wage was abolished. It is therefore the most relevant example. $2 an hour is not something many likely to accept in the US today, and of those who would, none is presently employed. The scientific method is useless in economics. The assumptions that it requires are not even close to being fulfilled in any economy. For all intents and purposes, economics is not a science, the scientific method cannot be used or replaced or enter into the discussion. Abstract thought, for better or worse, is all an honest economist has. Strict, scientific empiricism is indeed impossible in economics. Humans are ultimately not controllable variables. The ATTEMPT, which you claim needs to happen, is known as totalitarianism. Anyone who attempts a controlled experiment in economics without consent should be shot, and if it's with consent it's automatically uncontrolled by that very fact. The book you linked to was not a controlled experiment. Other things were not equal. Other changes in law aside from the ones having to do with the minimum wage were occurring. It falsely equates correlation and causation. Especially considering how skewed unemployment statistics are ( A large number of those most likely to benefit from drops in minimum wages are automatically dropped out of the statistics when they stop being employed, because they know they won't get jobs and therefore won't waste time "seeking" them). Besides, it's essentially subconscious dishonesty by policy makers. They know that fallacious economists will do this. So what do they do? Set the minimum wage increases in times of growth :). If you REALLY want to get some semblance of measuring the effects of the minimum wage-- make them big enough that their effects won't be obscured among other effects quite so much. Set the minimum wage to 1000 dollars per hour. Enforce vigorously. See what happens. It won't be fully valid, but more valid than current "research." " Sure, but the individual actions of on employer" Employers become employers by acting in the manner I described. To be cont. in comments.