From Kevin Williamson’s National Review article “On Minimum Wage, a Flight from Reality“:
Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is a way to try to force consumers of labor to value certain low-skill labor more highly than they do. But here’s the thing: They don’t. There isn’t any law that is going to make somebody voluntarily swap his Rolls-Royce for a stick of chewing gum, and there isn’t any law that is going to make any employer actually value a Burger King fry-guy (I’ve been one of those, too) in a way that is equal to how they value a newspaper copy-editor (yep) or a guy who hauls away debris from a construction site (ditto; pays better than I expected). Economic preferences are real, and you cannot legislate away reality.
What you can do is interfere with exchange. You can price out of the market entirely people whose labor is not actually worth $15 an hour to any employer, or you can force employers to try to offload those extra labor costs onto other employees, suppliers, or customers. You can encourage automation and other substitutions of capital for labor. And you can cause all sorts of chaos. What you cannot do is cause people to actually value low-skilled labor as much as they do more skilled labor. Some things are beyond the reach of legislation.
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In the real world, little green strips of cotton do not do anything useful. You can’t eat them or wear them to keep warm or sail to Japan on a raft of legal tender. The real world is made up of goods and services and labor, and the value that people find in such things is real, too. Really real. People actually do have their own priorities. You cannot change the real world by monkeying around with the record-keeping system. You cannot change the real value of labor by changing the minimum wage for the same reason that you cannot bring London closer to Paris by folding the map.