Beware the Minimum Wage Laws

Here is an interesting question to consider: do you support Minimum Wage laws? Do you know what havoc they can cause?

My Mum very much enjoys math. She is especially good at Algebra, where you can have unknown numbers and lines and formulas that will eventually straighten themselves out most of the time into a reasonable, sensible, understandable, and provable set of numbers or solutions. 
One of the things that I have learned from her love of math, is that there are some laws that all numbers follow. 
If you have an x, then it’s value is always the same. It could be a 10, or a 39.5, or a -999. But whatever number it is, it’s value is always x. 
All wages, regardless of inflation, have the value of x. This could be a yearly wage, a commission, or hourly pay in a forty-hour work week. Or even the small wages given to a kid for a job done for a neighbour, like lawn care or babysitting. All these have the same relative value, a proportion of x based on the value of the work done.
For the example, let’s imagine a fictional job at a large chain restaurant, like Subway or McDonalds.  The wage per hour we shall call x, and it’s value is x. 
With a check for the value of x, you can buy a book. Or you could buy a nice meal, or put it into savings or investments, or go out to see a play, or even stock up your pantry a bit more. Whatever you choose to do with x, It’s the representation of your long hour of work.
Let’s pretend the number value of x is 15. The value of your book is $15, because the same amount of work goes into the book as the many meals you prepared during your hour-long shift. The value of your ticket is $15, because the people putting on the show decided that an hour’s worth of work is a good price to pay for the performance they have been practicing for a long time. They did not attach the number value of 15 to their work, but rather the value of an hour’s worth of work, or the x that their spectators have earned. Later when the troupe goes out to lunch, they can then spend that x at the restaurant: they have earned it well and can spend it, putting it back into the economy, exchanging their work of acting for the cook’s work of prepared food, and thus we have a well-working economy.
But the troupe decides to move on. Heading to a larger state, they decide to set up at a big theater in a large city. This state has a minimum wage law set up. 
They put on one play, charging the standard $15 dollars admission. But after going out to celebrate after a particularly successful performance, they all are shocked to see that at the McDonalds they go to, even though they bought nearly the exact same food as what they ate in the last town, their bill is much, much higher, coming to a total of almost $20 per person.
This is the unseen effects of the minimum wage law. The cook at the restaurant received x, but his x came out to a numerical value of 20. 
The cook went out the next day and bought a book. The same book from the last town, but since his hourly pay was $20, the book, which was worth an hourly pay, sold that day for x, or $20.
The next time the troupe puts on a performance in that city, they up their prices to $20 each ticket. Not because their performance quality has increased, not because of new special effects or anything extra, but because the cost of everyday living in that city is x, and for them, x in that city is $20.

But the goods that they buy from outside manufacturers are not sold x for 20. They are sold x for 15. Thus the city’s stores and citizens can buy from outside of the city for cheap prices, falsely inflating and manipulating their economy, but the rest of the country cannot purchase from the large city as they cannot afford the higher-priced items, so either they take their business elsewhere, or are in turn forced to raise their prices. Our first person, whose x was $15, now cannot purchase the book for 15, because it was bought for x from the larger city, x being $20. 
This is the dilemma the minimum wage laws have caused. The solution? Hard to enact. 
The city’s pseudo-solution will be to raise it’s own minimum wage. That makes it easier for the people to buy things, right? They have more money, right? No. It only drives the prices higher. X remains the same, but the accumulation of previous wages earned and saved now value less, and yesterday’s x is now no longer worth an hour’s wage, but less.
So what should our solution be? Repeal minimum wage laws. Let the people decide what their work is valued at. If a cook’s skill is only worth $5 an hour, why force his employer to pay him $20, like in the larger city? If the cook is unhappy receiving only $5, then he will be forced to acquire more skill and drive his value up, or get a different job, losing his position to a more competitive person who is more skilled and able to work better than he. 
Economist Henry Hazlitt writes, “You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less.” By having a minimum wage of $20, the cook receives his $20 no matter how much effort he puts into his work. He may even be a loss to his company, but the laws require his employers to keep paying him. I doubt, though, that he would be able to keep his job for long.
The government probably could try to justify this by pointing out the paycheck of this man- ‘Look! Incredible riches! Compare this, if you dare, to the wages of the rest of the people of the country, to the areas untouched by our benevolent wage laws!’ but what they fail to point out is the ‘unseen’ yet painfully obvious and prevalent rises in the pricing of housing, food, and transportation. And eventually the city will no longer be able to support the stimulation of the economy, and the market will fall, unable to keep up it’s ‘high wages’ and pricing. The city, the state, the country, will crash, painfully far from repair.
Beware the minimum wage laws.