By Ari Armstrong, Complete Colorado
What happens when the price of eggs soars? People buy fewer eggs and start looking for substitutes. What would happen if, say, government set a $10 minimum price on a dozen eggs, higher than the usual price in stores these days? People would buy fewer eggs, yet producers would want to sell all the eggs they could. Some eggs would sit around unpurchased.
No one disputes the economics of price controls on eggs. (We can leave to another day discussion of legislative attempts to set de facto price limits on products.) But, somehow, when it comes to wages, we’re supposed to throw basic economics out the window and pretend that price controls don’t matter.
Obviously no one thinks that price controls never matter. If government set a minimum price of a dozen eggs at $1,000, no one would legally buy eggs, and the egg industry would be destroyed. Of course a black market in eggs would thrive in those circumstances. Likewise, if government set a minimum price for an hour of work at $1,000, no business would hire anyone, and the entire economy immediately would collapse (again, except for the black market).
So we’re talking about price controls within a range that affects an industry without destroying it. Which leads us to House Bill 1208, which seeks to mitigate the harms of minimum-wage laws especially in Denver and Boulder.