Minimum wage: Some people have less skill than others in the workplace. The best way to get them more skill is to provide them with experience and on the job training. If the law says that employers are not allowed to pay anyone less than $15 an hour or some other number then those people who don’t have skills worth that level simply won’t be hired…and they will never get the experience which would make them worth that wage.

Furthermore, for every one of these people not hired, overall economic productivity goes down and employment goes down…meaning there are less jobs to go around.

Those who seek a mandatory minimum wage have their heart in the right place and mean well, but the actual affect will often be the opposite of what they want: it will mean less jobs, more competition for the jobs, more jobs being replaced by automation and an even higher barrier for the poorest and most unskilled workers to get a job at all. Those workers who need a job the most, people with no experience at all or very low skills, are left permanently out in the cold while higher skilled workers take the smaller number of jobs.

A much better and more compassionate plan is to allow people to work and gain experience at whatever level they can and to allow companies to hire as many people as they want at whatever level and wage they can. This provides more people with experience and more overall jobs. If the workers skills are actually worth $15 an hour or whatever number, then there will be competition from employers to pay that wage…if the skills are not worth that level then companies simply won’t be able to afford to pay it regardless of what the government mandates.

Whenever we seek government as a solution, it not only often backfires but it always increases the size and scope of government and with it the corruption, corporatism, cronyism and violence that goes with that …as well as taking funds from citizens to pay for it. So basically we often have our wages taken to pay for things that actually do the opposite of what we intended.

Look to freedom as a solution.