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There is a fixed amount of money with which businesses can pay their employees. This amount is not affected by whatever the minimum wage is set at. Thus, raising the minimum wage would seem to necessarily reduce the number of minimum wage jobs available.
That said, raising the minimum wage would certainly increase the number of living wage jobs available: there are just fewer of these better jobs to go around.
Generally speaking, I oppose market regulation (rent controls, e.g.). I am not convinced that minimum wage laws are necessary in the American system because our rate of unemployment is so low. It seems that very few people would be willing to work for less than a living wage. Thus, I sympathize with both sides of the argument and remain personally ambivalent.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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