Sources of support for minimum wages

Don Boudreaux asks a good question:

Why do so many people who weigh in on this issue make such fantastically illogical "arguments" in favor of raising the minimum wage?

Here are my theories:
1. Tribalism. A minimum wage is a totemic issue, that separates "us" and "them". And when your side's under attack, you rally to defend your totem.
2. The cluebat's weak. The job losses caused by a minimum wage aren't large enough to show up in the macroeconomic numbers that get all the newspaper headlines. This is because the minimum wage is low enough not to have a big impact on wages, and the price-elasticity of demand for labour is low. Sure, if you look carefully there is evidence of cuts in jobs and hours (pdf), as theory predicts. But it's easy to avoid this evidence, especially if the confirmatory bias means you don't look in the first place. And it's easy to find people who have kept their jobs and hours, and so benefited from the minimum wage.
3. Exploitation. What angers some leftists about low pay is not poverty, but the fact that some people are profiting from it. So they support a minimum wage as a way of curbing the power of the rich, not as a way of enriching the poor. They think extreme exploitation is such an evil that unemployment is better.
4. Reaction to market imperfections.  The labour market often just doesn't function like a basic textbook, well-clearing market. This encourages the inference that intervention in the market might be beneficial.
5. A transitional demand. When I was a Trotskyite in the early 80s, I supported a minimum wage precisely because it was "impractical." We did so to show that capitalism* could not deliver living wages for all.
I'm still not sure if this argument is wholly wrong. 
6. The counterfactual. The minimum wage (along with tax credits) is pretty much the only game in town for reducing poverty.
But there is an alternative - a citizen's basic income. Intelligent supporters of a minimum wage acknowledge that a basic income is a better way of helping the poor. But the problem is, the alternative to a minimum wage right now is not a basic income, but nothing. And some think a minimum wage is better than nothing.
It's here, I think, that many libertarians are missing a big trick.If they were to call for simple, relatively unintrusive redistribution - say a flat tax plus a basic income - they could show that they were genuine about wanting to reduce poverty, whilst highlighting the irrationality of statist intervention.
As it is, rightist libertarians' silence (or hostility) to redistribution allows tribal defenders of the minimum wage to claim the moral high ground of being on the side of the poor.
* Vulgar libertarians please note: by capitalism, I mean private, unequal and hierarchical ownership of capital, not a free market economy.

Comments

[Matthew]

I think you miss a more fundamental point, which is simply that most libertarians and hence supporters of "flat taxes" (which of course aren't flat if they have a personal allowance, and should really be called 'less progressive taxes', but that gives the game away too much) really aren't interested in helping the poor. They also aren't interested in having higher marginal rates on their own income, which is why these suggestions of 15,000 tax-free allowances and 50% marginal rates are so naive.

The minimum wage is indeed seen as a moral thing - more akin to health and safety legislation, which also presumably adds to unemployment.

[Laurent GUERBY]

Am I missing something or Machin's paper shows constant or slight increase in hours worked and a significant increase in earnings (Table 1) from the raise in the minimum wage?

Number of reasonable worked hours multiplied by minimum wage plus social welfare as something that can be meaningfully compared to cost of living (housing, health, transportation, minimum equipment). If too low, I assume economists take into account at least some probable negative effects for people, like incitation to go on the other side of the law because you have no other choice, this costs taxpayer money too and ultimately the end of relatively peaceful society.

[Kevin Carson]

One reason that the minimum doesn't have much of an effect on unemployment is that it is applied across the board to all employers in a particular market and industry (i.e., the fast food restaurants in a locality). So it doesn't affect price competition between them. The real effect depends on the elasticity of demand for fast food, which probably isn't all that great.

IOW, Boudreaux must not be familiar with the phrase "ceteris paribus."