I have thought about this, and I might be wrong; I don’t know what combined effect is, but I think raising the minumum wage has a separate effect on inflating our currency than the printing of money does. Ultimately, I believe the combined effect will be more inflation, instead of deflation.

You are correct in saying employers base wages off the federal minimum instead of a preferable living wage, based on supply-and-demand. Leftists would argue that cheap labor is exploited absent a minimum standard; I have observed this to be untrue. In the case of migrant workers, when Hurricane Ike rolled through my hometown, manual laborers collectively organized and set their minimum at ten dollars an hour. With all the work, and few workers to do it, their cheap labor was no longer cheap, and certainly was not exploited.

The market will bear the price of work for its value, based on the simple supply of labor, and the subsequent demand for it. To beat the curve, workers gain skills in different areas. Skilled labor is able to demand a wage for their work, as it is considered to be at a higher value. This justifies multi-million dollar paychecks for executives like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson; their character defines their multi-billion dollar companies.

This cycle is broken by government intervention. As in the case with pigs during the Great Depression, artificial price floors will generate surpluses and can have devastating consequences (six million pigs were slaughtered during the New Deal to set a price floor, while some Americans starved). As in the case with our national sugar quota, price floors force demand into unforeseen areas. America’s sodas contain High Fructose Corn Syrup for a reason; similarly, people hire illeagal workers for a reason. Price floors push goods out of the market, while wage floors push people out of the market.

So while increasing a wage floor will eventually increase all wages, what is the ultimate cost of doing so? A laborer with any kind of skills that could have enabled him to demand 70 more cents an hour, now, effectively, is a minimum wage earner.

No one gains employment from a poor person; dictating to an employer what he has to pay a worker means less people are ultimately employed, plain and simple. As we approach ten percent unemployment, I would simply submit that now is not the time for this kind of intervention.