The Case For the Minimum Wage

Many thanks to Pro as well for this debate! In fact, I give her more thanks to her than she offered to me! “In the final round, it is customary to refrain from presenting new arguments” Agreed. Pro calls my case against the Minimum Wage “a radical concept that demands extensive justification”, but it doesn't appear to be very radical when you realize that there was no Minimum Wage during the economic prosperity of the Roaring 20s. “I nevertheless have tried to show why the minimum wage is useful within our economic system, and why it is both fair and needed.” But you've failed, since the Minimum Wage obviously wasn't needed during the Roaring 20s, when the unemployment rate was lower than it is today!1 “Con only challenged the premise that the minimum wage has never been shown to increase joblessness. All other arguments were conceded or dropped.” Wrong. I also challenged the argument that the “minimum level of economic achievement (for workers in most regions) is around $15/hour”, pointing out your blatantly dishonest sourcing for this claim through the last 2 rounds, a problem that you've completely neglected to address. Another argument which I challenged (and which Pro has incorrectly stated that I dropped) was the premise that “The minimum wage is affordable to businesses.” Allow me to quote myself from a previous round: “The victims are the jobless, the unemployed who could have been working, but weren't hired, because a business couldn't afford to hire them. 15% of young adults in the U.S.A. are out of school and jobless. That's 6 million people! Unfortunately, business can't afford to hire them at the rates the minimum wage laws require, so they leave them jobless.”2 (added emphasis) Pro has not addressed this. Pro goes to say that I posed the following argument: "Two studies showed that the minimum wage increases unemployment. Therefore, the minimum wage increases unemployment." Let me point out that this is awful paraphrasing, and Pro hasn't even taken the courtesy to note that this is paraphrasing at all. My argument on this point was also more elaborate than what my opponent tries to imply. I also provided a very clear graph that demonstrated how unemployment was lower without the Minimum Wage than it is with it. “My rebuttal to this argument was to ask where all the unemployment is.” Where is the unemployment? Right here, in our home-country. According to the U.S. Department of Labor3, 11,OOO,OOO.OO people are unemployed as we speak. Almost half of these people have been jobless forover half a year! “In order for the claim that this law has created economic havoc[...] to be believable, it seems that we would need some evidence other than the astounding economic success of the United States since 1938.” Astounding economic success of the United States since 1938? I guess you mean Black Monday in 1987.4 Or maybe it's the S&L Crisis that spanned two decades, during which time almost 1/3 of ALL savings and loaning associations in this country failed.5 But then again you may be referring to the Energy Crisis of 19797... or is it the Energy Crisis of the 2000s?6 There's also the Subprime Mortgage Crisis9 and Credit Crisis, complete with a recession in 2007.8 Pro says that the one of my sources, the Bureau of Business Research, made predictions that were “embarrassingly wrong.” This it totally irrelevant to this debate. I didn't reference their forecast for tomorrow; I cited their statistics on the past. Pro has said nothing to suggest that their hard numbers are even slightly off, and the fact remains: 16O,OOO.OO workers were laid off with the increase in the Minimum Wage in 2008. I posed the question, “Why shouldn't the Minimum Wage be set at $20 per hour?” Pro responded with a rhetorical question of her own: “If lower wages promote prosperity, then why not eliminate all wages altogether?” She then says that “The fallacy is obvious.” Well, I have to agree. It is obvious: she committed the strawman fallacy by misrepresenting my position. Throughout this entire debate, I have not once advocated for lower wages, nor claimed that they promote prosperity. I have only called for doing away with the legally imposed requirement on wages. Eliminating wages altogether would not sit with me either, since that too would require legally imposed requirements. Regarding Pro's final note, yes, I admit that I mistook the word “economic” for “employment”; however, this was unintentional. I wish she would have found time to apologize somewhere in the last 2 rounds for citing a source that did absolutely nothing to back up her statement. The Minimum Wage is not required for economic prosperity, and the success of the Roaring 20s is just one proof of this. Abolish the Minimum Wage, let employers work with the Laws of Supply & Demand free from the interference of meddling, uneducated politicians, and vote for me! 1http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu... 2http://www.debate.org... (Round 2) 3http://www.bls.gov... 4http://online.wsj.com... 5http://www.gao.gov... 6http://www.usnews.com... 7http://www.time.com... 8http://www.uvu.edu... 9Lemke, Lins and Picard, Mortgage-Backed Securities, Chapter 3 (Thomson West, 2012). 10http://www.washingtonpost.com...