Are You An Economically Ignorant?

Professor Butler Shaffer reports:

As political systems continue to unburden themselves from the harsh consequences of the laws of economics, nature, and mathematics, we may see more “progressive” programs forthcoming. If minimum wage laws continue to generate more unemployment – particularly among the unskilled or lower-skilled members of the workforce – such difficulties might be overcome with some remedial legislation, premised on the same thinking. If teenage unemployment is an unintended consequence of such laws, perhaps the same logic used on behalf of minimum wages could be used to help those sectors of the economy in which unskilled workers tend to be employed. Working as an usher in a movie theater, or flipping hamburgers in a fast-food enterprise, or pumping gas at a service station, are the kinds of jobs in which young people have historically worked and developed some skills. But if such employers are unable – or unwilling – to hire teenagers at a higher wage than they are presently getting, the solution is an obvious one: have Congress establish a system of “minimum prices” for products or services in these areas. If minimum prices for movie theater tickets were set at $15.00, and hamburger prices were fixed at a $10.00 minimum, and the price of gasoline (regular) was legislatively decreed at $8.00 per gallon, everybody benefits, right? Right? The business owners will make even more money with the higher prices, and they can then afford to pay the higher minimum wage to the unskilled teenagers!

Because some people think the demand for labor isn't a downward sloping curve.