Reductio ad absurdum has to be used within the confines of the question being debated, or it becomes a straw man argument. You have to work within the bounds of the original claim being made, which was not whether the minimum wage can be set to any level and have no effect on unemployment, but whether the minimum wage levels people are actually asking for are likely to lead directly to measurably higher unemployment. I said there was no discernable correlation, and that statement is correct. If there were a state with a $100/hr minimum wage and high unemployment, that would contradict my claim, but there aren't, so the question of whether an unimaginably high minimum wage might possibly cause more unemployment (which is by no means settled) is irrelevant, and a transparent attempt to play in the land of unprovable hypotheticals instead of talking about the reality of the situation we're in now.



I have no idea what this means. The paper directly those factors as other channels through which employers can respond to the higher minimum wages that don't involve "prohibiting" jobs. You seem to believe the current price of their labor has been magically arrived at by some perfect machine without any kind of elasticity or other adjustment channels other than laying people off, which is ridiculous. The paper calls these other channels out by name. If you can't tell me why none of those channels is valid, and firing people is the only option, then you have no argument.