[_delirium]

All a minimum wage law does is allow a society to shift its chosen point on an unemployment/wage tradeoff curve.

That's not the only thing it does, depending on the elasticity of various prices and wages. Another thing it does in some situations is increase the total share of money going to laborers while decreasing profit margins of their employers. This may or may not lead to the employer laying them off, depending on what the profit margins were to begin with; if they were very high, such that the post-increase margins are still nice (just not as nice), it's still rational to continue to employ the newly more expensive labor.

Consensus among economists these days on minimum wages is a lot more nuanced than it might've been 50 years ago, anyway. A majority of economists still think that they're on the whole a bad idea, but most would want to know what kind of economy you're talking about before giving specific predictions about their effects. The fundamental shift driving the "well, generally X, but it depends" view is a realization that economies can be quite far from classical equilibria, for quite long periods of time, in which case policies don't necessarily have the effects classical economics would predict.