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Matt_Simpson comments on A potentially great improvement to minimum wage laws to handle both economic efficiency as well as poverty concerns - Less Wrong
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Comments (74)
A better argument for the minimum wage is that empirically it doesn't have much of a negative effect on employment - see below - but it placates the political demands of a largely uninformed populace that might otherwise try to get much worse policies enacted.
(I seem to recall that Bryan Caplan originally made this argument, but I can't source with a quick google search.)
What worse policies are you thinking of? Only this sounds like the socialist argument against the welfare state...
In terms of liberterian arguments for the minimum wage, Chris Dillows takes the same tack http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2010/11/small-truths-about-the-minimum-wage.html but the opposite conclusion- fighting to get rid of the minimum wage is a distraction from the problem of unemployment, given it's low magnitude.