The Media’s Snapshot View

An AP story on the minimum wage begins, all too typically:

The nation's lowest-paid workers will soon find extra money in their pockets as the minimum wage rises 70 cents to $5.85 an hour today, the first increase in a decade.

Some versions of the AP story, though not the ones that ran in the Washington Post and the New York Times, did acknowledge the possibility that some low-paid jobs might disappear. But most of the news stories this week focus more on criticism of the increase for being too low than on the consensus of economists that minimum wage laws reduce employment for low-skilled workers. It's enough to make you think Bryan Caplan's right about the irrationality of the political process. But it's really just an example of the tendency to look at market processes with a "snapshot view" rather than a dynamic understanding of costs and consequences.

On an unrelated note, unions are outsourcing the arduous job of picket lines to non-union workers. Apparently the carpenters and construction workers are too busy working in our booming economy to have time to picket non-union contractors. The picketers aren't paid union wages, but they are paid above the minimum wage.