Despite bits of good news on employment in recent months, U.S. demand for labor remains very weak, with more than 40 percent of working-age adults currently jobless. The employment situation has been especially hard on workers with limited education and job skills, because their labor is not of great value to employers.

Given those facts, it’s surprising that there’s political movement in some jurisdictions to raise the minimum wage. New Jersey lawmakers are poised to increase their state’s minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour (the same as the federal minimum wage) to $8.50 by July 1 and require it to rise automatically with inflation every year afterward. Similar pushes are underway in New York State and Connecticut.

Surprisingly, there’s no such push in Maryland—yet. The state’s official minimum wage still stands at $6.15 an hour—currently superseded by federal law—and the last attempt to raise it, during the 2011 Legislative Session, died a quick death. However, Maryland is often quick to adopt “progressive” legislation from other states and, besides, lawmakers often take a sudden interest in the minimum wage when reelection is looming. So expect an Annapolis push for a minimum wage increase between now and 2014.

In preparation for that, supporters of free markets need to prepare their arguments against a minimum wage increase. Sadly, it’s not enough to simply point out that raising the price of labor decreases demand for that labor, which is detrimental to many of the low-wage workers that the increase is supposed to help. Advocates of increasing the minimum wage are quick to unleash emotional appeals and selectively cite the academic literature on the minimum wage in order to buttress their position; free-market supporters need to bring reason and a fuller understanding of the social science literature to the discussion. Most important, they need to point out that the minimum wage is ultimately a practically useless public policy for helping poor families.

Here are four points that free-market supporters need to stress:

The labor market appears to work well without wage regulation. Even in the difficult labor market of 2011, a mere 1.5 percent of workers earned the federal minimum wage (many of whom worked jobs that aren’t covered by the minimum wage laws) while another 1.9 percent work for sub-minimum wages (again, because their jobs aren’t covered by minimum wage laws). That means 96.6 percent of the labor market earned above the minimum wage. Moreover, minimum-wage workers typically are young—the majority are below age 25 and 30 percent are below age 20—with limited experience and job skills. They typically transition out of the minimum wage as their experience and skills accumulate. All of these facts are consistent with a well-functioning labor market. It is unclear why a minimum wage is needed to protect workers from a supposed employer monopsony that keeps less than one in 20 workers at or below the minimum wage.

Empirical evidence shows that minimum wage laws reduce jobs for low-skilled workers. Two large scholarly reviews summarize the major empirical studies on the minimum wage. The first was prepared by staff economists Charles Brown, Curtis Gilroy, and Andrew Kohen for the Minimum Wage Study Commission convened by the U.S. Congress in 1977, and later published as the paper “The Effect of the Minimum Wage on Employment and Unemployment” in the Journal of Economic Literature [Vol. 20, No. 2 (June 1982): 487–528] [J-Stor access here].

After examining more than 30 empirical studies, they found:

<> For teenagers, who comprise a large share of minimum-wage workers, studies typically found a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage resulted in a decrease in employment of 1–3 percent. The authors add that “the lower half of that range is to be preferred.”

<> For young adults age 20–24, who comprise another large share of minimum-wage workers, studies found the effect “is negative and smaller than that for teenagers.”

<> For adults over 24, who are a minority of minimum-wage workers, the effect “is uncertain.”

The report apparently soured Congress’s opinion of the federal minimum wage, as it was not raised again until 1990. However, several states chose to enact or bolster their own minimum wage laws during that time. That gave economists the opportunity to compare the effects of one state raising its minimum wage to nearby states where the wage stayed the same.

A flurry of new studies ensued, the most consequential of which was David Card and Alan Krueger’s American Economic Review paper “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania” [Vol. 84, No. 5 (December 1994): 772–793] [J-Stor access here]. They found no evidence that the increase had an adverse effect on employment in that industry, and it may have even increased employment. Card and Krueger are top-flight economists and honest scholars, so I take their findings seriously. However, other empirical analyses of the same industry by other top-flight, honest economists did suggest a negative effect [see David Neumark and William Wascher, “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment,” American Economic Review. Vol. 90, No. 5 (December 2000): 1362–1396] [J-Stor access here]. Overall, the new minimum wage research echoes the same disappointing findings as the earlier studies.

In 2006, economists David Neumark and William Wascher produced an exhaustive review of the new minimum wage research [NBER access here]. They found that “nearly two-thirds [of the 102 analyses reviewed] give a relatively consistent (although by no means always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages while only eight give a relatively consistent indication of positive employment effects.” Further, of the 33 analyses they “view as providing the most credible evidence; 28 (85 percent) of these point to negative employment effects. Moreover, when researchers focus on the least-skilled groups most likely to be adversely affected by minimum wages, the evidence for disemployment effects seems especially strong.” Neumark and Wascher conclude, “[W]e view the literature—when read broadly and critically—as largely solidifying the conventional view that minimum wages reduce employment among low-skilled workers.”

This is indeed the consensus view of economists. In their Journal of Economic Education paper “Consensus among Economists: Revisited” [Vol. 34, No. 4 (Fall 2003): 369–387] [J-Stor access here], Dan Fuller and Doris Geide-Stevenson report on the results of a 2000 survey of 1,000 members of the American Economic Association on questions concerning economic policy. The survey found that 74 percent agreed that “minimum wages increase unemployment among young and unskilled workers” (though 28 percent “agreed with provisos”).

So the general view is that, as the minimum wage increases, some low-skill workers lose their jobs because of the higher price of labor. The effect appears not to be large, but it does appear to be real—and very painful for those workers who go jobless as a result. As we’ll see below, the gain from a minimum wage increase is paltry, and doesn’t seem worth the pain of the additional unemployment.

Minimum wage laws target low-profit firms and industries. Minimum-wage workers are concentrated in just a few industries, such as food service, retail sales, and recreation. These industries often have thin profit margins, and a minimum wage increase takes a significant bite out of those margins. Because of that, it’s a fair question as to why these businesses should pay higher wages than what employees have already voluntarily agreed to.

The minimum wage is practically useless public policy. One of the great mysteries of minimum wage law is why such intense political battles are waged over it. After all, these laws have little effect.

Consider that, as already noted, only 1.5 percent of employed U.S workers earned the federal minimum wage in 2011, and many of them worked in jobs that aren’t covered by the law. And they typically were part-time employees, working an average of 27 hours a week.

Given those numbers, consider that the New Jersey proposal of a $1.25 increase would mean the typical minimum wage worker would gain less than $35 a week before taxes, while some of those workers would lose their jobs altogether. While $35 is nothing to sneeze at, is the tradeoff worthwhile? Couldn’t policymakers find better ways to help low-income households?