It's not about working hard, but being productive. The world's poverty (desitution) level has decreased from 80% in the mid 1800's to 20% today. Why? Because of freer, more competitive markets, enabling prices of products to decrease and innovations to improve the standards of living of the poor. Everybody is becoming more affluent, not just the rich. Those who benefitted the most from greater production were the poor, not the rich (they had these luxuries regardless of price.) Productive => lesser scarcity => fewer poor. Redistribution usually leads to lesser productivity (at least empirically), and consequently slows down the reduction of scarcity and the progress made to eliminate destitution. 

Not really. I mean, there's a certain level minimum wage where you would start to price work out of the market, but businesses only hire the labor they need to get the job done in good times or in bad, especially businesses hiring minimum wage in the first placce (the low-end service industries). Labor costs going up by 20% is not going to slow business by 20%, and in most restaurants and stores you're already running as bare-bones as you can without severely impacting customer satisfaction (my gas station could cut to one cashier at a time, but the lines would stretch around the store at times). Whether you're paying $5 an hour or $15 an hour doesn't affect the number of customers you get, at least not directly, so in the $5 an hour scenario they won't have on cashier standing idle because there isn't enough business, they'd send him home for the day whatever they were paying him. Conversely in the latter scenario (though there's a harder cap on it as you slide up the scale), if you *need* two cashiers to keep things running at an acceptable pace, you're going to pay two cashiers, whether that's $40 for a day's work or $120 for a day's work.

And this, of course, ignores the fact that if the other cashiers are also making $120 instead of $40, they're going to spend that $80, and probably spend it right away (because the marginal propensity to consume for the poor is very high), so that money is going to go to you, even if you have to raise prices a little to compensate.

It depends on the elasticity. If the labor supply is very elastic then those unskilled workers are replaceable with skilled ones who are worth the greater cost. If the labor supply is inelastic then your point stands. Ultimately, most real world situations show more elastic labor supply than otherwise. I wasn't arguing productivity will decrease, I was arguing that the minimum wage creates a barrier of entry into the job market for unskilled workers, who would otherwise use the job to gain skills and training, so that they can move up the ladder. Of course in certain markets there is a deadweight loss, but not in all. Also we must also consider automated cashiers and computers, which have no cost other than their manufacturing cost. 

This is why we see more college graduates (those who have degrees with no demand, otherwise) and fewer teenagers working in the fast food industry. 

That's not the fault of wages, that's the fault of the shrunken market. Shrunken market is what forces out the less skilled (over time. Companies do hate turnover and they're not going to fire someone explicitly because they can get someone more skilled to work for the same pay. That would happen with attrition) and pushes everyone with skills down a notch, as fewer opportunities at all levels mean that all kinds will have to work "beneath their station". A higher minimum wage sparks demand by forcing money downward from corporate profits into the hands of minimum wage workers who then create demand due to marginal propensity to consume, which can help lead to a trickle-up effect better than other stimulus packages which have an expiration date on them. Eventually these gains become negligible due to inflation, but inflation is at long-term lows right now (again, the market wants to deflate and the Fed is the only thing standing in the way), so there would be quite enough time for some gains to work into the economy.

And more people are having children when they are unable to raise them or have children with fathers or mothers who are not fit to have children.

What? When you make a minimum wage law, you are creating a price-floor. One learns in economics 101 that a price floor above the equilibrium price creates a deadweight loss by shifting the supply curve (or demand curve, depending on how you want to look at it.) You keep espousing macro-economic rhetoric involving thrift when we're talking about a microeconomic question. 

that's because Microeconomic models only ever function under ideal macro conditions. You can't talk about a supply-demand gap when the supply-demand gap in employment is huge for much larger reasons than minimum wage.

This is why they should teach Macro first. Teaching micro first makes people think that micro models are how the economy "should" work.

Unfortunately macro-economics is too far behind to do that. It is arguable whether or not micro economics is scientific, and the amount of conflicting hypotheses and data found in macro is so much greater, at least micro-economics has a deductive basis to make up for the insuffiecient inductive basis, macro seems more like a bunch of competing philosophies: neo-keynesian, new-keynesian, (blanket label) keynesian, neo-classical, monetarism, austrian, etc, etc. There was a time when keynesians encompassed all of macro-economic thought as being correct for instrumental reasons, it worked (at least seemingly), but then it started to not work during the many crises of the 70's and ever since.  Ultimately, it seems better to just use deductive logic until something empirical can be resolved (if it can be resolved, maybe the austrians are right with the economic calculation problem.) 

Heh, austrian school is just the manifestation of the cancer of post-positivism in the body of economics (just as the post-positivist cancer struck in most other social sciences at the end of the 20th century).

Macro works because it deals in pure aggregates, whereas individuals are by no means bound to follow the dictates of microeconomics as some seem to believe. Aggregates do work through the noise and arrive at the mean actions of a population.

(edit: not trying to make it sound like i'm disparaging all other economic schools of thought, which i might disagree with but at least Chicago School and Monetarist branches have something to bring to the table. I have a very dim view of Austrian in particular and feel its very presence distracts from serious discourse in the field)

I wasn't declaring the austrian school as correct in their protest to positivism, outright (in fact: I tend to disagree with their quick refusal to treating economic thought like a science.) However, as it is now, science has not succesfully been applied to economics. These schools of thought all use models which support their own claims, and they create these models to support such claims. No model has been empirically verified as superior to any others, however. So ultimately it's a bunch of a competing hypotheses. This is precisely why private businesses and the sector in its entirety don't use macro-economic models. They aren't any more reflective of reality than micro ones, and for the purposes of these firms, micro ones at least give them ideals to push toward that are likely in line with nature. Nevertheless, many keynesians have historically opposed the minimum-wage as well, for many of these same reasons. 

After researching the topic, it appears that you are citing the empirical study and explanation given by David Card and Alan Krueger. Here's an interesting article about it, what are your thoughts? 

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/03/the_vice_of_sel.html

I agree very much with the following quotes:

Another reason why Card-Krueger hasn't flipped my position: Despite my admiration for their craftsmanship, even the best empirical social science isn't that good.  I expect true theories to predict the data only two-thirds of the time - and false theories to predict the data one-third of the time.  (N.B. Many of the weaknesses in empirical social science are systematic, so the Law of Large Numbers is no salvation).  Bayesian upshot: The Card-Krueger findings only slightly reduce my initial high confidence that the minimum wage causes unemployment.

But suppose you disagree with me on both counts.  Suppose you have a weak prior about the disemployment effects of the minimum wage.  Suppose further that you think that the best empirical work in economics is very good indeed.  Doesn't existing evidence then oblige you to admit that the minimum wage has roughly zero effect on employment?

Hardly.  Why not?  Because there is far more "existing evidence" than meets the eye.  Research doesn't have to officially be about the minimum wage to be highly relevant to the debate.  All of the following empirical literatures support the orthodox view that the minimum wage has pronounced disemployment effects: