That is the view of writer Holly Sklar in today’s N&O.

The economic folly of believing that any net good can come out of coercive tampering with the price system has been fully discussed here and elsewhere. Alas, writers like Sklar never pay the least bit of attention to economic arguments.

What I’d like to point out is that having any minimum wage law at all means accepting the idea that it is permissible for the government to use coercion against one group of citizens in order to make another group of citizens better off. When you clear away the rhetoric, what’s going on with the minimum wage is that the government tells one group (those who employ others) that unless they pay workers more money, they will be subject to legal punishment.

Why should the law take sides like this? Doesn’t it destroy the idea that justice should be neutral? And doesn’t it set a horrible precedent? After all, if the law can be skewed so as to favor employees over employers, it can also be skewed in hundreds of other ways to favor other groups with sufficient political clout.