[motters]

This seems like bogus reasoning. When a minimum wage was introduced in the UK unemployment went down, at least for a while. The article contains assertions, but no experimental results. An experimental economist would experiment with different minimum wage levels and observe the results.

I think the bottom line is that economies are complex systems, and simplistic "just so" narratives which don't take multiple interdependencies (themselves adaptive systems) into account are typically insufficient to describe the dynamics of these systems.

[yummyfajitas]

When a minimum wage was introduced in the UK unemployment went down, at least for a while.

This is because politicians are (usually) smart enough to introduce minimum wages only during growth periods and to keep the minimum wage well below market rates.

I won't speak about the UK, but in the US, less than 4.5% of the poor earned minimum wage [1].

http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2007.htm

When the minimum wage is raised significantly higher than market rates, the results can be devastating.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/node/127791

[1] I'm dividing 1.7M min wage earners / 37.3M poor people to get an upper bound. The real number is less since many min wage earners are teenagers or spouses from non-poor households.