Reply #117: I'm not an anarchist

[divinecommands]

... and I didn't say government can't improve people's lives sometimes. Likely, raising the minimum wage would improve the lives of some dramatically. But we must examine the hidden costs as well as the obvious good. The hidden costs includes jobs not created because people looking to start small businesses can't afford to do.

You might say, "Well, someone else will just create those jobs." Possibly true. And, most likely, it will be a huge corporation like Wal-Mart that can cope with higher labor costs.

The point of my more recent examples, like ethanol subsidization and insurance mandates, is that they're indicative of the kind of people we have in charge right now. If laws are going to be passed, they're going to be passed by THESE people, not the phantom legislators the left wishes were in power instead. The current crop of politicians likes giving away money to corporations and then hiding that they are doing so. They often do this by using gilded rhetoric (talk of the "common good") to mask their true purpose.
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"What's your logic... that because some laws are bad, we shouldn't try any others to help solve problems."

I might just as easily turn this back to you. What's YOUR logic? That, because some laws have been good, we should always welcome more of them? I would say we should engage in policy analysis: first, figure out what problem the law is supposed to solve, and how we'll be able to tell when the problem has been solved.

That's what I'll ask you: what's the problem raising the minimum wage is supposed to solve? How would we know when we'd raised it enough to give people a living wage? Supposing your proposed policy were successful in solving the problem, how would that be reflected in various measurements (unemployment, poverty rates, small business ownership, etc)?
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My definition of the problem is something like this: the problem is that many workers are employed in low-skilled, low-paying jobs, and not enough of them are moving out of those jobs. My solution to that problem is to make it easier for these workers to train and educate themselves and upgrade their skills. There are various ways to do this, and I haven't settled on one yet. I know Ontario has government funded apprenticeships that seem to work very well.