Resolved: A Minimum Wage Should Exist.

Before I get into pro's arguments, I need to address the dropped arguments. Pro-"Before I begin, I'd like to say that I dropped nothing. I explicitly said that I would consider your first argument in this round. I didn't have enough room to adequately refute your original argument in my first argument, so I devoted this round to doing so." This is disappointing. Let's look at DDO's definition of a dropped argument. "Drop - An argument is dropped when it is not responded to. Arguments that are dropped are usually considered true for the remainder of the debate. You must respond to an argument once it is made, you cannot wait until the next round." [1] Pro claims he had no room, but he used 4390 out of 8000 characters in the second round, leaving him with 3610 characters, or 45%, to rebut my arguments. Please note I'm not calling pro a liar, but his claim doesn't match reality. However, I said I would extend those, so I stand by that. Also, pro dropped my argument about there being no compelling evidence that the minimum wage reduces poverty. No mercy this time. Now for pro's attempt at rebutting my case from libertarianism. Pro quote mines the Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He begins, "Self-ownership conflicts with Pareto-Optimality," but the full quote is "Richard Arneson, on the other hand, has argued that self-ownership conflicts with Pareto-Optimality." [2] He states this as a fact when it is merely an opinion. He then gives a ridiculous example of scratching a finger to save the world. A libertarian would simply ask permission, although this scenario is obviously unrealistic. Pro states that self ownership is paradoxical because it is not utilitarian in nature, but this is a non sequitur. There is no logical contradiction identified by pro, merely an objection. Pro has failed to answer my argument. Pro-"When applied to businesses, the needs of the many workers who depend on the minimum wage is more important than the wants of a few employers to make contracts with people with wages below the minimum wage." Who are you to judge whether the needs of some outweigh the needs of others?This is an entirely subjective statement with no basis in fact. I do not trust the government to tell me whose needs are more important than others. Pro- "The whole idea of "self-ownership" and "voluntary contracts" doesn't have much of an effect in a debate on the minimum wage." I thought I explained why these concepts are important. If individuals want to make a contract below the minimum wage and the employer happens to be involved in interstate commerce or deals in at least $500,000, they cannot make a voluntary contract that would benefit both parties. Therefore, the minimum wage violates their right to voluntary contract. Pro-"The vast majority of people making the minimum wage need more, and rightfully should earn more, but the contracts they are able to form prevent this from happening." How did you decide that people earning the minimum wage should earn more? This statement is subjective and arbitrary. A worker should paid exactly the amount he can fairly earn in the free market because that is his economic value, the objective standard by which "fair" pay ought to be decided. The minimum wage interferes with the free market by artificially raising wages without increasing value. In fact, studies show that the minimum wage harms the productivity of a worker long-term. [3] Pro-"While my opponent's argument that the minimum wage causes unemployment appears valid, reality is different." Notice there's no refutation of my argument, merely claiming reality is different. This is because it doesn't make sense for low-cost labour to be magically exempt from the law of demand, one of the most fundamental concepts in all of economics. Pro- "One need look no further than a chart showing the real value of the minimum wage against unemployment." No statistical analysis, we are just supposed to look at a graph and try to spot a trend. This is indicative of a weak case. Also, a lot of factors might influence pro's graph that aren't shown, so there is no way to draw conclusions from the graph. Also, nobody is claiming a statistically significant effect on all employment, merely low-cost labour. On to pro's new study. Pro claims that more precise studies tend to show a smaller decrease in employment. Firstly, for a small change in the minimum wage one would expect a small change, possibly even a missed change, in employment levels. Secondly, studies with low standard errors are more likely to show a low level of change by simple statistics. Given the nature of the probability distributions of the standard error, one would expect that it would be most likely to encounter an abnormally small standard error with data clustered near zero. Standard error is a statistic, not a parameter, and it may differ from the standard deviation, which is the parameter. An abnormally small standard deviation indicates that the data were more clustered than data gathered by a simple random sample would be, indicating flawed methods of sampling. Note that the vast majority of studies in that chart showed a decrease in employment. A large factor in the results of Doucouliagos and Stanley is they provided no controls for the quality of the studies shown. A more reliable meta-study of over 100 other studies was conducted by Neumark and Wascher in which they controlled for quality. Quoting directly, "However, the oft-stated assertion that recent research fails to support the traditional view that the minimum wage reduces the employment of low-wage workers is clearly incorrect. A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages." Pro then claims that more people enter the labour force when the minimum wage increases. This claim is unwarranted because of his odd choice of source. If you follow the link he provides, you will find that his source leads to a paper about the status of working women and has nothing to do with the minimum wage. Pro defends the Card-Krueger study cited last round. He claims that the fast food industry is demand elastic. It is true that its product's demand is elastic, but pro didn't answer the point about the elasticity of the industry's demand for labour. Pro seems to have gotten those confused. Secondly, he states that Card-Krueger (CK) reanalyzed the Wascher-Neumark study and found it incorrect. However, CK's analysis focused on number of employees rather than total hours, which is the real question. [4] Thus, their study is less reliable. Finally, because the changes in the minimum wage are relatively small, a large effect on employment is not expected. The effect may be small, but we know it's there because of unbreakable economic laws. On consumption. Pro claims increased consumption will benefit businesses more than increased investment and profits. Every cent that the minimum wage gives is taken directly from the business. Increased consumption may help alleviate this, but it cannot do more than the decreased investment. Also, pro claims increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 would create 85,000 jobs, but the nonpartisan CBO reveals it would cost 500,000 jobs. [5] On income inequality. All of the effects pro attributes to income inequality are to poverty, and this is exactly what his source says. I established last round that the minimum wage doesn't help poverty, a dropped argument by pro, so the minimum wage wouldn't help with these bad effects. Pro is straw manning by saying, "As for the claim that only teenage, part-time employees receive the minimum wage..." I pointed out a large demographic of minimum wage workers. Sources 1- http://www.debate.org... 2- http://www.iep.utm.edu... 3- http://www.nber.org... 4- http://web.stanford.edu... 5- http://www.cbo.gov...