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Wages

Libertarians reject minimum wage laws.

Reducing unemployment and creating jobs is only the first step. People work so that they can trade their labor for the things that they want and need. Libertarian policies will increase purchasing power and discretionary income for everyone, especially the working poor. In order to increase real wages for workers, we need to increase productivity, while ending the misdirection of resources from the poor to the rich.

The easiest way to do this on the state level is to increase discretionary income overnight by cutting government spending and taxation. Next, eliminate or uncomplicate the regulations that are driving up our costs of living dramatically. We also need a more diverse, dynamic economy, and the way to achieve that is for the government to stop selecting winners and losers with targeted tax exemptions, subsidies, regulatory capture, and other special treatment.

There are many good reasons to believe that a minimum wage can not increase real wages for the poor or middle class in the long term. Real wages represent an employee's actual buying power of the things they want and need. The mechanism by which the minimum wage is supposed to work is by redistributing "profits," (or wealth) from owners to employees. But none (or very little) of that redistribution comes from upper class consumption. It has to come from somewhere, usually investment that would make everyone's life better. But worse, it makes it difficult for start ups with little capital to compete with entrenched interests. Meaning that in the long term, it reduces the productivity that can increase living standards for the poor, and also contributes to the kinds of concentrations of wealth that it's supposed to ameliorate.