The Daily Show with Jon Stewart screened a backwards supply and demand graph. Whatever, mistakes happen. They fixed it the day after. The irony though is that they screened it during a segment which criticized the view that supply curves slope downward – that minimum wage causes unemployment.
I can accept that at some margin the tradeoffs of minimum wages are utilitarian within the right margin. I can even accept that the right margin is higher than what it is now. What I’m very suspicious of is that with 99% of demand curves sloping downward, that we happened to pick the one that didn’t slope downward to fix the price of before we had any theoretical or empirical justification for it. I find it far more likely that liberals believe that minimum wage is different is as a rationalization for the policy they’ve always liked in the first place.
