:

that found that Seattle’s $15 minimum wage was costing the city jobs. 

“According to the study, pay for low-wage jobs in Seattle has increased by about 3% since 2014. However, that wage increase has been accompanied by a 9% reduction in hours for such jobs, which comes to a loss of about a $125 in earnings per month for the workers.”

To complicate matters, it’s not as if Missouri is against the minimum wage in theory or practice. Lawmakers merely disliked the figure St. Louis had established as the wage floor. It bears asking: Why are lawmakers in Jefferson City better equipped to set a minimum wage than lawmakers in St. Louis?

that many people’s exuberance for economic equality has led to public policies that, in the words of one Twin Cities progressive, rely on “arithmetic [that] doesn’t work.”

But instead of debating the degree to which government should require one private party to compensate another, perhaps it’s time to begin asking a new question: Why do we continue to use force or the threat to compel one private person or entity to compensate another?

 

 

[Image credit: Daniel Schwen [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons]