Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Here . He claims: "If this minimum-wage hike is truly justified by employer monopsony power, there’s no reason for any delay in hiking the wage." Well, one reason to phase in the hike, even if one believes in monopsony power, is epistemic modesty: perhaps one's diagnosis is wrong, so let's start the treatment slowly, and see how the patient responds. If critics are right, and unemployment spikes, we can always repeal the law. A second good reason for gradualism would be that even adopting a healthy diet or dropping a bad habit can be a shock to the system: cold turkey can kill a serious alcoholic, while gradual withdrawal might work fine. It only took me a couple of minutes to come up with two perfectly sound reasons for phasing this hike in. If one is going to write a column claiming there is "no good reason for X," it is a good idea to spend at least a couple of minutes thinking about whether there might be a good reason for X. Note: As I've s...

Over at Kids Prefer Cheese , Angus mocks a very silly argument: "Finally, I'd like to ask my conservative friends to stop making the 'if a higher minimum wage is good why stop at $9, why not make it $90 and everyone would be rich' argument. "It's just silly." Yup. Here is an equivalent argument: "Oh, you doctors say to drink 8 glasses of water a day: Well, if water is so good for you, why don't we just drink 800 glasses a day?" Well, because it is quite possible that some amount of x is good, but a much, much larger amount of x is bad, hey? (At a high enough dosage water becomes a poison that will kill you. But no water will kill you just as surely!) The above, of course, doesn't prove that a slight raise in the minimum wage is good. But it does show how bad that oft-repeated argument against it is. UPDATE: Don Boudreaux, no minimum wage advocate, agrees that "Why not $90?" is a bad argument.