Don Boudreaux is a genius of the highest order

I am extraordinarily grateful that I currently earn more than the minimum wage. I hope misfortune, ill-health or other calamities never conspire to lower my earnings potential but I'm ever-wary that they might and I like to reason about such things on that basis. That is: I assume I am never more than one piece of bad luck away from the edge; there is nothing intrinsically "better" about me that means I "deserve" to earn more. Life is precarious.

The existence of a minimum wage in many countries seems, on the face of it, to be an unambiguously good idea: surely every civilised society should arrange for workers to be paid an honest day's pay for a hard day's work? Unfortunately, there's a problem: when you raise the minimum price somebody is allowed to pay for somebody else's services, you have just outlawed anybody whose labour is worth less than that level from taking a job.

Don Boudreaux explains why well-intentioned thinking isn't sufficient.