I agree that setting up straw men and other fallacies is a bad thing. There's two sides to every argument and they should be heard without reducing the argument down to insults or misrepresenting the other side's point of view.
On the other hand, I think you're yourself abusing the association fallacy by making a bold assumption that because the article points towards examples of laws with unintended consequences that they also automatically applies to the specific examples you've given. (i.e. opposing the minimum wage doesn't mean you hate the poor, but it equally doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to cause negative unintended consequences as implied)
As a recent counter-example to the blog, view the UK's introduction of a relatively high minimum wage in 1998 which, despite above-inflation increases over several years, have caused little-to-no problems. Incidentally, the UK had it's highest employment rate in 2007 according to National Statistics Online (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=12). By the blog's reasoning, the exact opposite should have happened. For the record, I was fairly indifferent when it was introduced, but now I see it as a positive thing.
The blog makes the rather bold statement that "anybody whose labor is not worth the minimum shall not be employed" based around the assumption that anyone who earns less than the minimum wage's job is redundant and can be replaced. This simply isn't true, thinking about the large amount of service industry workers (e.g. waiters, supermarket-workers, fast-food workers) who are typically paid a low wage but are unlikely to lose their jobs. It doesn't mention that many companies can afford to pay more for unskilled workers but choose not to in order to create bigger profits in the knowledge that the employees don't have the choice of getting a better paying job. It avoids mention of the effect of increased consumption in the local economy, or the likelihood that price increases which require more manual labour will effect premium goods and services the most. There's plenty more additional variables too - it's simply not a case of the situation being summarised as "Higher wages = less jobs".
It's not clear cut, mainly due to a lack of useful data. I don't know much about the labor market in the UK (your link only discusses employment/unemployment in 2007, not the effects of minimum wage in 1998), but I'll discuss the US.
In the US, only 1-2% of workers make minimum wage. If a minimum wage law drove 50% of them out of work over 2 years, it would increase unemployment by only 0.25-0.5%/year. And 50% is a huge; in reality, far fewer than 50% of minimum wage workers will be driven out of the market.
The effects on minimum wage also don't last much beyond a few years, since the minimum wage is not indexed to market wage for low skill jobs (or even to inflation, which is not the same thing). So in a few years, the minimum wage drops below market wage and becomes irrelevant.
This effect is sped up by companies raising prices (since costs rise across the industry, this doesn't cause a loss of market share). This drives up prices, causing inflation, which again reduces the effect of minimum wage.
Minimum wage is mainly just a a propaganda tool for politicians. That's why it's not indexed to inflation: if it were, they couldn't get on TV and say "I care about America's poorest workers" every few years. That's also why minimum wage is kept low; if they pushed it above market wage for the bottom 1-2%, the harmful effects might be large enough to be visible (even if they are questionable, this is not a risk a politician wants to take).
Well said. +1. I think Russ's point was that if minimum wage actually was raised high enough by the well-meaners that they thought it would institute social change, it would backfire in a most comical and epic way. Imagine if the minimum wage were set to 100/hour tomorrow...
Instead, politicians just wait till election season then realign the letter of the law to more or less match the current market value and then proclaim what a friend to the poor they've been from the doorway of their gulfstream.
On the other hand, I think you're yourself abusing the association fallacy by making a bold assumption that because the article points towards examples of laws with unintended consequences that they also automatically applies to the specific examples you've given. (i.e. opposing the minimum wage doesn't mean you hate the poor, but it equally doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to cause negative unintended consequences as implied)