Proving the minimum wage is a bad idea in the real world

Seattle is having a teachable moment.

An American Enterprise Institute report sums up the results.

Spoiler alert: It’s not pretty.

Seattle passed its $15 law in June 2014. Starting last April, it raised the minimum from $9.32 (the state minimum wage) to $10 for certain business, $11 for others.

Increases to $12, $12.50 and $13 an hour began taking effect for most employers this Jan. 1. The jumps will continue until the minimum hits the full $15 an hour in 2017 for some before it’s universal in 2019.

Yet even the early impact is harsh.

The AEI study, worked up from Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly surveys, shows that, between April and December last year, Seattle saw the biggest employment drop in any nine-month period since 2009 — a full year into the Great Recession.

The city unemployment rate rose a full percentage point.

Before the minimum-wage hikes begin, Seattle employment tracked the rest of the nation — slowly rising from the 2008-09 bottom. But it started to plunge last spring, as the new law began to kick in.

Furthermore, Seattle’s loss of 10,000 jobs in just the three months of September, October and November was a record for any three-month period dating back to 1990.

Meanwhile, employment outside the city limits — which had long tracked the rate in Seattle proper — was soaring by 57,000 and set a new record high that November.

Let's go over the three basic reasons the minimum wage is bad and wrong:

• It is government telling a private organization (a business) how to conduct its affairs (what to pay people).
• It distorts the  market value of an hour of a given type of labor.
• It elbows the most economically vulnerable out of the job market.

Now Seattle knows.