swalsh81To continue with Porphyrogenitus’ post. The use of the argument “why not raise it to x million” is arguing against the type of statement that seems to be used by most of the defenders of minimum wage: a categorical statement. It seems that most of the time you hear people defend minimum wage it is presented in such a way that minimum wage is necessarily good and cannot have negative consequences. Thus, using a reductio ad absurdum statement like, “well good then, lets raise it to 1 million so everyone can be millionaires” is what their argument can be reduced to. And, using their same logic, taking 100 aspirin would be better then taking 2.
On the other hand, if a person argues that there should be a modest minimum wage that does not exceed some low amount, then using the “raise it to 1 million” argument isnt legitimate because they are themselves stating that they are not talking about excessively high amounts. At that point, we move on to a real economic discussion.