As always, I am loyal to your work, and found your recent article of interest, and thought to respond to it. I should state that I will not attempt in any way to state that your reasoning is false in and of itself, or that your points are not thoughtful or rational, rather I wish to question one element, one presumption within your argument, the statement that minimum wage, ultimately, is a negative thing.

Now I take that concept from both the overall tone, and more importantly, the conclusions as taken to extreme, which is that the introduction of a minimum wage must needs lead to a spiral of ever lost value for money, requiring a raise in the minimum wage, and ultimately the collapse of production entirely, when the situation reaches an improbably infinite state.

I argue that a minimum wage is a good thing, not a destructive thing, but only when the minimum wage is seen in a certain way, in terms of the purpose of it, and only if the implementation of a minimum wage is done with carefully capped, which is to say limited, boundary conditions.

To make this argument, I must first answer your questions three, thusly:

1. If the cost of labor is increased, how are employers to avoid these costs? For bills are bills, and money does not just appear. If more of your money goes into one place, less must go into somewhere else. I can think of three places for the money to come from: from profits, from other peoples' salaries, or from cut corners.

This statement is correct, as far as it goes, but the answer to it is that the money must come from either one, or a combination of several, of the elements you cite: Profits, or Other People's Salaries. It should not, I think, be taken from Cutting Corners.

Profits, for most companies today, are extreme, for we live in a world of corporations, often multinational in scope, where the primary focus is on creating value for investors and owners, and the degree of profit is often overwhelmingly vast. With this comes also unbelievably large salaries for those in the elite ranks of society, where a single executive may make as much as the income of an entire small third-world nation in but one year. Investors are paid very well also, and so a case may be made that there is far greater return for productivity than was ever imagined possible in other times, due greatly to the advancements in technology humanity enjoys.

2. How can a business with increased cost of production avoid a greater chance of failure? For although many businesses could still survive under these conditions, there will certainly be some who could not.

Survival or failure of a business depends on many factors, from marketing ability, to distribution access, to changing consumer needs, to the overall functioning of society as a whole. Ultimately, the ability to weather short term problems comes from the accumulated wealth of a business, but there is no way to escape a total and final collapse of a market, if what is produced is no longer needed. Diverting wealth to provide for minimum wage places a drain, of course, upon all business, but so do many things, from taxes to pay raises for executives. The degree of risk is managed best by rational decisions about available funds, in the moment, and with regard to the future, in any case, whatever drains are in place.

3. If the production of something is decreased, how is the price of it to avoid increasing? For the tendencies of the minimum wage (to decrease the chance of success and increase costs) make production more difficult, and thus to decrease the supply. A thing which becomes scarcer on the market commands a higher price.

This is not always an inevitability, as I will shortly demonstrate.

First, taking the answers, or rather the responses, which I have given above, in mind, I ask now to examine the purpose of a minimum wage in the first place, with regard to all.

Minimum wage is nothing more, and nothing less, than governmentally enforced secular humanist compassion. That is its purpose, its meaning, and its value.

If a civilization values humanism, if it values human life and human survival as important, then that society must be judged by the state of the weakest, and the most wretched members of it, for in their state, one may learn all that needs be known about the degree to which said civilization collectively lives up to its own values.

The value to a civilization of caring for its weakest and least capable members is more than arbitrary, it is a highly rational thing, for even the strongest may fall, due to circumstance, and even the weakest may prove of absolute value. This is because of Nature, which on one hand is dominated by random events, misfortunes and chaotic collapses of fortune, and on the other by an equally random distribution of talents, abilities, and genius. To put this in perspective, it should be noted that at this very moment, there are at minimum one-hundred thousand geniuses, equal to, or greater in caliber, to Albert Einstein, or Stephen Hawkings, alive upon the globe. Enough to make up the population of a very large city, if collected in one place, and all of them far more intelligent than it is possible for an average person to even fathom. One may wonder, then, where are the Warp-Drives, the Teleporters, the Immortality Serums, the Hyperdimensional Gate Machines, and all manner of science fictional wonderments, if this is true, and the answer to this question is that the geniuses that could have given mankind these things, and more, are employed otherwise. They are employed, in the most part, by what they have always been employed at, which is to say, digging ditches, growing rice, shovelling excrement, starving in alleyways, or working in sweatshops for money far less than minimum wage. They are without education, without means, without hope, lost to humankind forever, and only a very small, extremely fortunate few, manage to get decent enough employ that they may have time to work on matters of genius on the side, much less be lauded for their abilities.

But also there are beside them the great lost artists, the never to be heard singers, the lost writers, and designers, and storytellers and all manner of useful talents. Lost to a perpetual serfdom, lost to mankind. Now, in part, their misfortune is one of dumb luck, being born at random in poor places, and in part of temperament, for the artistic and genius temperament is all too often an unaggressive one, a personality more concerned with invention than with ambition.

Meanwhile, the ambitious, determined, and ruthless, rise rapidly to the top, in accord with these traits, and without regard to any degree of genius beyond that unimaginative functioning demanded of common business practice, or financial gain.

It is thus that our species elevates even mindless ambition, but condemns certain genius to obscurity, unless said genius also possesses some trace of ambition, some facility of self promotion, or randomly is found interesting to the media, or to some wealthy patron.

It is in the interests of a civilization to advance, thus making allowance to protect and to support all people, however wretched or lacking in ambition is of value, to preserve the possibility of genius, or hidden talents. Social compassion, therefore, serves a selfish, and an intelligent, purpose.

Thus I submit that the wretched should benefit from a minimum wage, and perhaps more, and it should be at the expense of the most grotesquely wealthy, the most ambitious and the most ruthless, from the leaders of industry, the owners of corporations, the investors, who all receive wealth far in excess of their actual benefit to the world.

The most useful purpose of Government is to address the needs of a civilization as a whole, to see that common needs, such as roads, are built, and to insure fairness in all dealings, so as to prevent the rule of gangs and thugs, and this the destruction of civilization. Part of the issue of fairness is in the redistribution of wealth, for wealth is nothing but a tool, and a food, the lifeblood of survival. Government, in protecting the common good of civilization, should therefore, if it is an intelligent government, look to the value of intelligence that lacks ambition and ruthlessness to succeed, and make sure that a minimum decent level of survival may be guaranteed, so that no genius is lost to mindless and exhausting constant labor, but instead has some small time, at least, to devote to thought, and discovery, and education, and bettering itself. Minimum wage is a very reasonable way to do this, and it should not cause the price of goods to rise, or the value of money to drop, if the minimum wage is not allowed to ever become absurdly high, and if the money is taken from the richest people only, to whom money is so common that were they to spend constantly every day of their lives, they would still only see their wealth grow (The billionaire is a good example of this, in that compound interest alone renders any but the most extravagant and lordly of lifestyles without any risk whatsoever of real loss).

Minimum wage is a social tool to play Robin Hood, to take from the obscenely wealthy, and give to the potentially useful, but utterly guile-less poor. Well run, with corporations and companies prevented from allowing greed to make up for the loss of personal super-wealth with the gutting of productivity and the raising of prices, in short, limits placed all around, a minimum wage program should, rationally, serve the long-term interests of civilization as a whole, rather than the short-term greed of the few aggressively ambitious elite individuals too base to see value beyond their own luxury.