Debating the minimum wage and its effects is an interesting topic but I think there's a good mental exercise here in the part I initially quoted.
market forces alone move slowly and not enough
This statement to me is really interesting. It is beneficial to come back to fundamentals. What are market forces? What is enough?
I think if we get to the heart, we can talk about this in very simple terms. Capitalism is predicated on individuals having the freedom to enter into exchange for mutual benefit. When we use money as the medium, the exchange is triggered by an agreement between two individuals on price. Market forces are nothing more than an aggregation of these single exchanges. We talk about things like supply and demand but these are ethereal concepts that really represent these collected buying and selling definitions.
Individual hiring and firing decisions are not special or in any way different. Employment itself is an exchange between two individuals, and the exchange is made when two agree on a price.
I don't see how anyone could talk about market forces moving fast or slowly "enough". To make that judgment you're assuming you know the value of one unit of labor or another better than not only every individual singly but also everyone collectively.
If "enough" is something else - something not interested in actual value or free mutual exchange, but some kind of ideal of social justice... well, that's nothing to do with market forces at all, other than the fact that we're introducing an artificial price control onto a commodity. All that does is cause general price inflation for consumers, as well as eliminate jobs from the market.
