“Supply-and-demand doesn’t apply in medicine” declared a headline in the Honolulu-Advertiser. And the soaring cost of medical care in the United States has moved pundits to call for some kind of government health insurance. In typical fashion, politicians have joined the crowd by offering solutions that increase their power rather than to examine ways that government created the problem in the first place.

In the United States, federal and state politicians are eager to raise the minimum legal wage—again. They have raised the minimum legal wage a dozen times before, but they complain that it is never enough. The prices of food, clothing, and shelter keep going up faster than wages. So politicians offer to solve this problem with a new law to raise wages. Don’t fall for it. Politicians are the cause of the problem, not the solution.