HELP: How do minimum wage laws harm people?

The single most important idea in economics is as something gets more expensive people tend to do less of it. So increasing the cost of hiring means on average firms will do less hiring.

Also, if a minimum wage creates a surplus of labor firms lose little by treating their employees poorly. I might prefer (1) a nice boss who provides me with training and pays me $5/hour to (2) a mean boss who will give me no training and pays me the minimum wage. A firm might also prefer (1) but a minimum wage law prevents the firm and individual from agreeing to (1).

Finally, if a minimum wage creates a surplus of labor firms will hire the most qualified people they can who are willing to work at the minimum wage so low quality workers will never get jobs even if the jobs would have provided workers with the skills needed to someday get above minimum wage jobs.

Basically the idea is the minimum wage reduces employment (http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/10/12/what-the-new-minimum-wage-research-says/). Another criticism is that the benefits don't necessarily go to someone who needs the help (for example it may go to teenagers getting their first job). I find it hard to understand having a good grasp of economics and having an intuition that minimum wage laws are good. Are price floors in general a good idea? At the very very least, they're a very kludgy and indirect method of helping poor people.

My understanding of the evidence is that minimum wage laws is that they are not especially harmful, but they're not especially helpful either (I have this link in my notes from when I did a bit of digging on this topic for the same reasons as you but from the opposite direction http://www.jstor.org/pss/1942818). Basically, minimum wages aren't a huge problem, but if your goal is tp help poor people, there are better ways to do it (for example the Earned Income Tax Credit seems to work pretty well).

I suspect this view is shared by most of this community, although I haven't seen any discussion of it.

Why do you suspect this, despite your avowed lack of evidence bearing on the matter?

The Wikipedia article gives the theoretical argument against, which is basic microeconomics, and some empirical studies on the matter, and describes some alternatives. The studies are all statistical and appear to be of marginal significance, making relevant the now well-known criticism of medical studies.

Does anyone have anything to add beyond that article?

Here's a good Cafe Hayek post on the subject of arguments for and against (not about minimum wages directly, there's one level of meta for safety.)

Specifically, they link to this list, summarising the (vast) number of economic studies revealing negative consequences of minimum wage laws, including some non-obvious ones, like

"The minimum wage causes employers to cut back on training."

Hashimoto (1981, 1982), Leighton and Mincer (1981), Ragan (1981).

If you think about it, the most predictable harms should come from the same mechanisms as the benefits. And the mechanism? Complicated economics. Or at least that's the mechanism I'd like to emphasize, since it's harder to quantify the other ones.

And what do I mean when I say complicated economics? I mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony#Minimum_wage . Look at the diagram to the right. It took me about an hour of actual work to understand what that diagram means to the minimum wage, so no rush.

I think one thing is this: minimum wage jobs might discourage people from hiring people to do jobs that are potentially high risk and have a chance of producing no positive results (but these same jobs might be funner since they're more creative - or they might use untested labor).

Lots of people are now willing to work for "free" - it's called crowdsourcing (as documented in many books). It might be an extra incentive for them if they have a limited monthly income less than the minimum wage.