Minimum-Wage Foes Tripped Up by Facts

We interrupt this holiday season to revisit the minimum-wage experiment going on in various cities and states, paying special attention to those opposed to plans by some locales to eventually adopt a $15 hourly wage.

The forecasts of these critics -- that jobs would be lost and businesses would close -- have, so far, been proven wrong. Although this is interesting, what’s most important is why they were wrong. In many cases, they suffer from the sort of systemic bias that is typically observed in the self-destructive tendencies of too many investors. To many of these minimum-wage foes, government can do no right, and any effort to ameliorate some of the defects or inefficiencies in the free market will always and everywhere prove counterproductive.