Now that the minimum-wage fallacy, or truth, dispute has run its course,  
please note a generic fallacy it exemplifies.  I've been holding back,  
hoping someone else would bring this out.  That is the fallacy of selective  
trivial agendas.  Minimum wage itself affects a fraction of the workforce;  
payroll taxes affect the whole workforce, and of course employers, too.  
  
Several things follow:  
        1, Keynesians who believe the supply of labor is highly elastic  
should oppose payroll taxes  
        2, Chicagoans who dump on min wage laws should dump even harder on  
payroll taxes  
        3, Anyone arguing that the labor supply is inelastic, or perversely  
elastic, would at least be consistent in favoring min wage (but I can't  
think of anyone who does show that consistency)  
        4, Payroll taxes include much more than the FICA and Medicare  
deductions.  They include all personal income taxes based on work effort, of  
whatever kind.  They include all charges on employers based on payrolls,  
e.g. workmen's comp.  
        5, Payroll taxes induce substitution of capital and land for labor  
        6, To stop taxing payrolls we must raise taxes on property income.  
Either that or cut back on government services.  There is of course a lot of  
fat in the public sector, including non-functional imperialistic warfare and  
associated sweetheart contracts, but that is another fallacy of selective  
focus, for there is also fat in the private sector: land rent (implicit and  
explicit, imputed and cash, conventional and novel).  
  
In the History of Economic Thought, it should be important to dig out why  
the writers with the most financial backing (academic or otherwise) fail to  
bring out any of the above points while obsessing over min wage.  
  
Mason Gaffney