"I regard minimum wages as disgraceful. They disgracefully strip low-skilled workers of a valuable bargaining chip -- namely, the ability to compete for jobs by offering to work at wages below an arbitrarily set minimum. As a means of increasing some workers’ difficulty of finding employment, minimum wages are simply less sanguinary than would be a government policy of, say, chopping off all low-skilled workers’ left hands or poking out their right eyes. Unless you believe that such overt violence against low-skilled workers would not worsen their prospects of finding employment, you should see that the veiled violence against these workers that is so sweetly called 'the minimum wage' disgracefully worsens their prospects for finding employment." --Don Boudreaux on CafeHayek.com