Although the minimum-wage legislation's avowed goal is to benefit low-earning workers, in practice its most vocal support comes from union members who already receive wages well above the legislated level and who seek to restrict competitive entry into the labor market. Most people, however, accept such laws because they believe it will benefit those in the lowest income brackets. Those who are truly concerned about the welfare of such individuals could achieve their objective far more surely by lobbying against minimum-wage laws and other regulations that hamper economic mobility. In a free market, of course, they could also lend assistance from their own pockets, channeling it into income subsidies or job-training programs.

The causal relationship between minimum-wage laws and unemployment is widely recognized among economists of different schools and political persuasions. When this relationship is pointed out to advocates of such regulation, they sometimes counter: "No job at all would be better than working for X dollars an hour." In the latter assertion, "better" may be construed either in terms of subjective value or objective value. Let us examine the assertion from both points of view.

Subjective value: If a worker chooses to work at X dollars an hour, then clearly that wage has greater utility on the worker's personal value scale than the disutility of the labor. If regulators deny the worker that choice, they are imposing their value scales over the worker's own.

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