If minimum wage laws don’t cause unemployment, why not make the minimum wage $100 per hour? That would be an even more liveable wage, wouldn't it?

I'm not racist but.... it's all those dreadful Chinese, isn't it? Daring to engage in productive activity! Bastards! Can't we just have laws that shut us off totally from the outside world? Think how rich we'd all be then?

And if people persist in mutually beneficial consensual private relations, that should be decreed an economic crime. The death penalty would not be too good for these uppity peasants, but at the very least they should be tasered, handcuffed, and locked in a cage with a gorilla called Bubba who has "L-O-V-E" and "H-A-T-E" tatooted on his knuckles dragging. That'll teach people to want an income more than the dole! Who do they think they are, daring to question their betters in the Labor party, the vanguard of the revolution

Re minimum wage, there are way more incompetent high earners than there are incompetent low income earners. The both cost the rest of us dearly.
Until the majority of the population realises that we can no longer afford to "keep" people even on a minimum wage we can't change anything. We must move away from the notion of "entitlement" & move towards reward for effort. The right mindset for that could be achieved by way of non-military national service. Instead of education we must focus on training better mentality & a national service will do that. It will make people more competent & therefore useful & employable. Businesses can't afford to just keep them, they need to be able to make a profit because they're not charities.

Is your post aimed at me, Peter Hume, Jardine whatever your name is today?

Must be as I'm the only one that mentions China.
I think you've miss interpreted my post.

I am not an economist, so I make no presumption to tell whether or not the idea of lowering/removing the minimum-wage is economically good or sound.

All I can say is that it is outrageous and totally unacceptable when two adult and fully-informed individuals freely wish to enter into a deal between them (assuming that deal doesn't hurt anyone else), yet the government intrudes and labels the one 'employer' and the other 'employee', then sets conditions on what their private deal must or must-not include.

I concede that if one (or both) of the parties is a company, then it is an economic matter, which should be left for the economists among us to discuss.

The rationale for that difference is that while government has no right to take away individual freedoms, nothing forces anyone to incorporate themselves with the government, so if they choose to use the government's "incorporation service", then there may be a price to pay.

What is absolutely clear, is that all individuals who operate in their individual capacity must be IMMEDIATELY exempt from all IR laws.

What a load of garbage Yuyutsu. Power relationships between employer and employee are rarely on a level playing field. We need industrial relations interventions to stop exploitation. If you do not think exploitation exists, try talking to some workers especially those working in small businesses.

Those people advocating lowering the minimum wage do not seem to realise that the basis of capitalism is consume and spend. If your population is so badly paid that they cannot buy your goods, what happens to your business?

It only seem to be the well paid who come up with this rubbish and they are unlikely to take a pay cut themselves - real not in my backyard thinking.

These 'studies' vaguely referred to in the article obviously haven't done a simple comparison of how the minimum wage levels in various countries correlate with their unemployment levels.

Countries like Mexico, with one of the world's lowest minimum wages (US$0.58), has the same unemployment level as Australia (about 5%), which has the world's highest minimum wage. In fact, countries with the highest minimum wage levels also have among the lowest unemployment levels.

Until the GFC, high minimum-wage countries like Ireland and Greece had low unemployment levels. The sharp rise in unemployment in recent years had nothing whatever to do with the level of their minimum wage and everything to do with the hyper-salaried CEOs, politicians and banksters who ran their countries into bankruptcy to pay for their own mistakes.

It's the MAXIMUM wage that has done so much damage to the world economy, not the minimum wage.