I am often asked at town-hall meetings why I don’t favor raising the minimum wage. The answer is easy: Raising the cost of labor means it will be harder for people making minimum wage to find a job. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has reported that it will lead to half a million more Americans being out of work, most of them low-income people. If you cut off the bottom rungs of the pay ladder, don’t be surprised when fewer people can start climbing it.

The problem in increasing the minimum wage is if you want to go from $7.25 to $10.10, why don’t you go to 50 bucks an hour? Why don’t you go 100? The answer’s obvious – it would inflict enormous damage on the economy, especially on people who wouldn’t be hired but would still have to pay the resulting higher prices for everything.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren seems to be serious about it, though. Speaking to a left-wing pressure group, the Massachusetts Democrat asserted that the minimum wage ought to be $22 an hour. She based her figure on an argument about productivity that turns out to be totally wrong. She said a $22 minimum would reduce “income inequality.”

It probably would not. As Thomas Sowell once wrote, the real minimum wage is always zero – the rate of pay for those who do not have a job. If employers are told that they must pay someone at least $22 an hour or nothing, many will look at the books and decide that some jobs just don’t make economic sense. A nation with millions more people earning zero, others earning $22 an hour or more, and no one in between will be much more unequal.

The facts are simple: If you raise the price of something, people buy less. That’s why anti-smoking activists want taxes to raise the price of tobacco – to reduce tobacco consumption. That’s why President Obama’s first energy secretary wanted to “figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” as a means of making people drive less.

So why would anyone believe that if the government makes labor more expensive, employers will continue buying as much of it as they do now?