Minimum Wage should keep pace with inflation

To Pro"s first point, that it provides an incentive to hire skilled labor to make vending machines, how many people are involved in producing such innovated capital goods? While one engineer and one mechanic can conceivably create a vending machine, the forces of a market tends to lead to mass production. When it comes to stages that are more removed from the final customer, like in automobiles, there are companies that higher over 600 workers just to produce exterior automotive lighting (headlights and taillights), not counting the people that make all the other parts of a car and the people who assemble the final product (http://www.stanleyelectricus.com...). When it comes to employing people to make these parts that go into the final good, it tends to be lower skilled workers with a small part of the information cooperating to effectively create great feats of human engineering compared to the days of trades-masters. The next point I want to cover is Pro"s statement that a person worth only $2 of productivity should not work and be forcibly removed from the labor pool, resulting in only quality goods and services, and that a person should work harder before being employed. First, employers can only make an educated guess on what a worker will produce before hiring them; a 20 year old with only an associates degree against a 20 year old who has lots of work experience and was an assistant manager at a restaurant-chain with a steady $11.50 per hour income are two different "risks" with differing experiences. One shows a person who has a good signaling device (a degree), but has no experience showing his use of intellectual talents in production. The latter worker does. Prior work experience, which you are cutting off from younger members of the population, has a lot to do in signaling productivity; a person who proves to be an able producer will soon be able to bargain for more than $2 an hour if their productivity proves to be more; otherwise, they would seek employment at a place where they earn more. Pro"s stance that those whose marginal productivity is less than the minimum wage is also in contrast to federal laws; "The Secretary, to the extent necessary to prevent curtailment of opportunities for employment, shall by regulation or order provide for the employment, under special certificates, of individuals ... whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury, at wages which are lower than the minimum wage."(http://www.dol.gov...) That is, people today for reasons of old age, physical, or mental disability are already made exempt to those larger firms who can go through the paperwork. Such stricter standards would unemploy even more people than a simple hike with existing laws would! As for Pro"s point about greater tax-money making it easier for a laid-off worker to attain a better education, why is it assumed that a university/tech-school education is the best method? After all, both on-the-job training at a starting rate lower than normal and an education can take the same amount of time, the difference is that one is wealth creating (the apprenticeship) while the other is first destructive (in the form of taxes) before being spent to increase skills. Also, the time in which people with above-minimum wage jobs lose them without a back-up plan is during a downturn; where is government gaining money in an economy on the downturn? As for Pro"s point to real wealth, we both have competing views, though my own on real wealth coming from what is made and bought, rather than on the nominal wage each person receives for their labor, has not been disproven, but merely asserted against. In stating that competition can take the form of lower wages, this is not the historical case; less than 5% of people today work for minimum wage or less legally (http://www.bls.gov...). If we have to worry constantly about this competition to the bottom making everyone poor, why is it that we have less and less people working at or below the federal minimum, even when inflation is making the minimum wage less effective? Most humans (excluding those who like to make themselves miserable) seek out better situations for themselves; companies in search for good workers seek to keep and attract more productive workers. The minimum wage simply sets a higher bar to "getting one"s foot in the door;" once there, workers use their prior experience and their skills to gain more profitable employment, in the same way that craftsmen specialize in a unique good only they can provide to gain a better profit and how investors see whether buying this or that stock or machinery leads to better gains. Also, real wealth includes more being able to be bought with less; a more productive process creates more of a good for less labor, and the results are the likes of which even a low-wage earner can partake in.