re: Local minimum wage laws

E.S.K., your argument is strong if you can get the state and the feds to agree to never tinker with the minimum wage again. I don't think either will ever give up that power. Minimum wages are too easy to pass off on the public as "good law," so there will not be the popular outcry against them necessary to get states and feds to scrap or at least ignore the minimum wage. So, in my opinion, by letting local municipalities set their own minimum wages, the negative affects of minimum wages will be much more visible because of the ability to compare neighboring cities, therefore discouraging politicians at the state level from grabbing at easy political capital by raising them themselves statewide, where the negative impact is less observable because all municipalities experience the same things. Allowing localities to govern their own wage rates is not necessarily condoning wage controls :-). This actually an issue where I think good can come from bad. If the state blocks local municipalities from doing this, we're stuck with the bad because it is more difficult to shine the light on the negative aspects of minimum wage increases.

I'm also skeptical about the idea of a non-uniform state minimum wage hurting business & capital recruitment to the state. Minimum wages affect those two items a lot less than things like tax rates do. Where we would see an affect is in small businesses, unfortunately. But here's the catch. If much of this is done on the local level, small businesses are going to be much more capable of blocking it than if it were done solely on the state level.

Side note unrelated to the topic of this post:
I encourage this type of debate here, everyone. And thank goodness we are finally off the topics of ferel cats and nudity at the BBA.