How often have you heard someone say, “The government needs to raise the minimum wage,” or, “We need a decent minimum wage”?

I hear it (and read it) all the time. Most recently, I read it on my local newspaper’s website, where it appeared in the “comments” section of this week’s poll. (Scroll down the page a bit, and on the right side you’ll find the poll. Click “Current results” and then click “Comments” to view the comments voters have made so far.)

A person made the following comment on the poll question:

We need a change in leadership, We need new legistors to stand up to the abuses of power and who will take what the average American has to say. We need a decent minimun wage without cutting estate taxes for the rich How can we vote for a party that deceives people by attaching the estate tax bill to the minimun wage increase.

In response, I posed the following question: what would happen if the government raised the minimum wage to $20 an hour? (The answer: the cost of the McDonald’s Big Mac—and a lot of other things—will triple; jobs will be eliminated, and businesses may be forced out of business.) By posing this question, I hope to get people to understand what a farce the minimum wage is and always has been.

There never will be a “decent” minimum wage. That’s because whenever the minimum wage is raised, companies will eventually raise their prices to make up the loss, and we’ll be right back to where we started. My younger brother saw this on a personal level—he works at a McDonald’s restaurant and saw first-hand what happened when our state of Minnesota recently raised the minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15. The minimum wage artificially drives up the cost of products. The only way to counteract this would be for the government to put price caps on products, but that is certainly one of the quickest ways to destroy an economy.

There is a glut of information about all the problems of the minimum wage—see here for one example—and yet so many still unfortunately believe in a minimum wage, and a “decent” one at that! We should do our best to correct this glaring problem.