Brian Choi once owned a small grocery store in a tough black neighborhood in Atlanta, where Willie and Maurice Matthews, two young kids from the neighborhood, used to hang around. They needed money, and they asked Choi for help.

Choi's little business didn't generate enough profit for him to afford to hire them. But Choi, with the approval of their parents, allowed the brothers to carry customers' bags for tips. Choi bought the brothers clothes, and when he had some extra cash, he gave them some pocket money. This arrangement worked for Choi, for the young men and their parents, and for Choi's customers.

Enter the federal government.

When the Department of Labor discovered that Mr. Choi was not paying the brothers the minimum wage, it fined him over $6,000 in back wages and threatened him with prison time. Mr. Choi had to tell the young men they could no longer work at his store.

Here were three sets of people: Mr. Choi, the Matthews brothers and Mr. Choi's customers, each of whom was willing to engage the other in the labor market. The brothers' unskilled and inexperienced labor wasn't worth the minimum wage. But it was worth something. And the brothers were willing to accept the small payments Choi's customers thought their labor was worth. Everyone was better off — until the government showed up to make things “better.”

Would the boys have been better off earning the minimum wage? Absolutely. But two young men with no experience, no training, little education and fewer opportunities usually don't face the option of working for the minimum wage. They face the options of working for less than the minimum wage or not working at all.

When well-meaning bureaucrats intervened with the intent of forcing Mr. Choi to pay the minimum wage, they made the brothers' lives worse by forcing Mr. Choi to let them go.

The simple fact is that raising the minimum wage only helps some workers. It helps those who could have earned more by shopping around for a better job. But some workers can't earn more by shopping around because they are already being paid what they are worth. Raising the minimum wage doesn't force employers to pay these workers more. It forces employers to let them go.

But the minimum wage persists because it is gold for politicians. In a 10-second sound bite, a politician can dupe less-educated workers into lending their support on Election Day in exchange for the empty promise of higher wages.

State and local politicians across the country have jumped on the bandwagon for higher minimum wages. But if they really believed that raising the minimum would help low wage workers, then why stop at $12? Why not raise it to $20 or $30? Because a $12 hike is small enough that the number of less-skilled, less-educated, less-experienced workers who lose their jobs or never get hired in the first place will be small enough to go unnoticed. At $20, the unemployment effects would be great enough to convince everyone of what economists have been saying for decades — raising the minimum wage helps workers who would have eventually ended up earning more anyway, while harming the most disadvantaged workers.

And that economic truth wouldn't get the politicians anywhere.

This article first appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.