# How do minimum-wage and living-wage laws affect the job market?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-minimum-wage-and-living-wage-laws-affect-the-job-market/283614>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [January 7, 2005, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-minimum-wage-and-living-wage-laws-affect-the-job-market/283614 "2005-01-07T18:17:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\
**Post date:** [January 15, 2005, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-minimum-wage-and-living-wage-laws-affect-the-job-market/283614/41 "2005-01-15T00:58:53Z")

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**SS:** \*If the government mandates a 50 cent higher minimum wage, and everyone makes it, there is no incentive whatsoever to be more productive. It’s far, far more likely that productivity will go down, because the cost of labor goes up without a corresponding increase in per-worker output. \*

But how does your theoretical “likely” measure up against the real-life consequences of actual MW increases? Seems to me that over the past few decades we (I mean we in the US, I don’t know the deal for you guys in Canada) have continued to have increasing productivity even when the government has raised the MW, and that the stats quoted in other posters’ links here bear that out.

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**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\
**Post date:** [January 15, 2005, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-minimum-wage-and-living-wage-laws-affect-the-job-market/283614/42 "2005-01-15T05:38:52Z")

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> [@John Mace](#):
>
> But you are simply making up your own definition of [coercion](http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=coerce). In your defintion, everything unpleasant that happens to a person is “coercion”. You have eliminated the part of the definition that is \*\*essential \*\*to the meaning of the word.

But some of the forms of “coercion” that can happen to a person living a country with a safety net as tattered as the U.S.'s are not just “unpleasant” but catastrophic. People can lose their homes and have to live out of their cars. People can lose thier ability to take care of their children and have to give them up to family or adoption. People can lose their health insurance and find themselves unable to afford vital medications.

These siturations are not ALWAYS what happens as a result of unemployment, but they DO happen. Such a situation is not merely “unpleasant” it is absolutely horrific. Just because no one is pointing a gun at your head, it doesn’t mean your situation isn’t desperate. And that may not consist of “coercion” in your narrow sense, but it’s close enough for any reasonable person.

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**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\
**Post date:** [January 15, 2005, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-minimum-wage-and-living-wage-laws-affect-the-job-market/283614/43 "2005-01-15T14:11:24Z")

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**John Mace:** \*But you are simply making up your own definition of coercion. \*

But so are the libertarians who arbitrarily restrict what they consider illegitimate “coercion” to rather narrow applications of the concepts “force” and “fraud”. If you look at the dictionary definition of “coerce” that you yourself linked to, you can see that it includes much broader meanings of the term:

> [@](#):
>
> 1. To force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; compel.
> 2. To dominate, restrain, or control forcibly: _coerced the strikers into compliance_. See Synonyms at force.
> 3. To bring about by force or threat: _efforts to coerce agreement._

There is plenty of room to dispute what the most descriptive and useful definition of “coercion” truly would be, but the libertarians cannot assume that their particular definition of the term is intrinsically the “right” one, any more than **RTF** does. I tend to agree that his use of the term (applied to impersonal “circumstances” as well as actual agents, as long as the circumstances are bad enough) is unhelpfully broad, but I also think that the standard libertarian definition is unhelpfully narrow.

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