Over at the Huffington Post yesterday, David Sirota boasted about how he “publicly embarrass[ed]….right-wing pathological liar…John Stossel on national television.”
Now, John Stossel is a major reason why I am a libertarian today. When I was little I watched 20/20 every Friday night, and I always looked forward most to his pieces on government meddling. Since those days I’ve seen him engage a variety of people in argument and answer some tough questions–once I even had the pleasure of watching him speak live–and I can honestly say that I never saw Stossel embarrass himself. Nor do I believe that this can be chalked up to bias confirmation on my part; I have seen people with my views embarrass themselves in argument before, myself included, but I always recognized it as such. So, naturally, I had to see if Sirota actually had humiliated one of my libertarian heroes. (Check out the video here.)
Long story short: fuck no, he didn’t. Sirota argues that because the states that have higher minimum wages added more jobs in the recent past than their counterparts with relatively low minimum wages that the minimum wage does not have a negative effect on employment. of course, the problem is that this line of reasoning is entirely fallacious: the sun does not rise because the cock crows.
The minimum wage is a price floor, and any economist worth a damn will tell you that price floors cause surpluses, in this case a surplus of labor. Now, if I were to tell you that I dropped an object that was heavier than air, and then it “fell” up, wouldn’t your first reaction be “there’s no way that’s true because that defies gravity.” Same thing here, except what Sirota claims defies the law of demand. What Sirota leaves out is what is unseen. If there were no minimum wage, those states would have added jobs even faster than they did, but we can’t see what might have been.
Finally, when Stossel refuted Sirota’s non-sense by asking him why not a minimum wage of $10 or $20, he just starts yelling that Stossel is changing the subject. False. He just took Sirota’s argument to its logical conclusion, and Sirota couldn’t stand that everyone in the room, himself included, knew precisely what the result of a rigorously enforced $20 minimum wage would be: mass unemployment.
