Eliminating the minimum wage would increase the labor supply. I'm not sure how you think that would increase wages.

That was re: corporate incentives. The lack of/lower minimum wage abroad is a major incentive for moving labor out of the country.

> The lack of/lower minimum wage abroad is a major incentive for moving labor out of the country.

And sanctions, tariffs, penalties, fees, fines, lawsuits, and prison time are major incentives not to move labor out of the country.

No it wouldn't. Higher wages increase labour supply.

You're thinking about the problem from the wrong perspective. Higher prices do encourage people to sell more (in this case their labor). But a price floor excludes a whole category of people (the young, unskilled, or transient) from the market. Its this category of people that would now be eligible to compete in the labor market

You're describing demand for labour.

Labour supply is the amount of workers willing to work at a given wage. Demand for labour is the amount of workers wanted at a certain wage. If someone's excluded from the market at a certain wage, it means there isn't demand for their labour at that price.

> You're describing demand for labour.

> Labour supply is the amount of workers willing to work at a given wage. Demand for labour is the amount of workers wanted at a certain wage. If someone's excluded from the market at a certain wage, it means there isn't demand for their labour at that price.

If the person is excluded from the market, how does that show lack of demand for their labour at a certain wage? The person isn't even a market participant at that point.

If someone is willing to work for $5, they will be willing to work for $15 [0]. The fact that they don't work is at all when the wage floor is $15 is because no one is willing to hire them at that price. Hence, it is a demand side issue.

The supply/demand curve here is a bit tricky, becauce, given a minimum wage of $15, the demand for labor at $14.99 is actually less than the demand for labor at $15, because employers are generally not willing to break the law over $0.01/hr

The very word excluded implies that the person excluded wants to be included, otherwise we'd simply say they're outside the labour force or non-participants.

> ...a slew of laws regarding safe working conditions.

Not sure that's necessary, I'd be for removing ones which have no practical impact on working conditions (i.e. haven't been shown to apply to any situation where non-compliance was at some point common), but labour demand is going up quite a bit even without considerable changes to workplace safety regulations. Some of these regulations could even be argued to increase labour demand (not that that should be a goal of any workplace safety regulation).