There are a lot of policy questions where two factions take an extreme position and shout at each other. There are even more where one faction wrongly characterizes the other as extreme and shouts against the strawman. Three easy examples are Taxes, Minimum Wage and Communism versus Capitalism.
Everybody wants their taxes to be as low as possible. Of course. But taxes pay for needed services: police, fire, the military, bank regulation, public education, and so forth. Some anti-tax warriors argue that all of these things should be implemented through the market, but all have been tried, and all failed catastrophically. They also argue that if taxes go too high, that "job creators" will stop hiring people. At some point this is probably true, but there is no evidence that any tax level under 70% has caused this problem, ever, andwhile there have been a few short-lived economic pops from tax cutting, all so far have led to longer term economic declines and spiraling government debt. The answer lies somewhere between. Taxes need to be high enough to provide the needed services, but low enough that only "discretionary income" is affected.
The minimum wage suffers from the same argument. The people who are given a higher wage because of a law have more money to spend. This stimulates the economy. A few businesses may not be able to sustain the higher wage and may have to cut employees, but quite a bit of practical experimenting has made it clear that the stimulative effects balance the higher costs in the vast majority of cases. Again though, it's important to recognize that all the practical experiments are with relatively small changes. None have been as precipitous as the doubling that a few municipalities have been proposing. Most of the proposals today are to raise the present $7.25 minimum to about $10, which would put it in line with where the minimum was in 1968, which while the highest national level ever, we know it didn't hurt the economy or employment opportunities for low wage workers. $15 might cause problems, but we don't actually know. It's hard to imagine that raising the minimum wage to $25 or more not causing problems, but the only people people suggesting anything like that are the opponents of raising it or having a minimum wage at all.
Perhaps the most important argument of all is the one between the various forms of government-participant economies, ranging from regulation of specified industries to full government-operation of virtually all businesses, versus, laissez faire capitalism. Everywhere either has been tried, both laissez-faire and full government control have failed disastrously, requiring violent repression of the opponents of either regime to even survive for a few months. The example of Chile is instructive: a US funded coup d'etat overthrew the elected socialist leadership, and spent much of the next decade implementing increasingly abusive restraints on the people, to try to impose a free market. Every ratcheting up of force resulted in the market being less free and more dominated by fewer and fewer rich people, and more and more poverty. Even though the regime has been gone for more than 20 years, the lingering impacts persist to this day. Chile under socialism was one of the stronger economies in the western hemisphere. The drive to deregulation and lower taxes for the wealthy is having the same effect in the United States, and the repression is more subtle: nearly all of it is through propaganda. At the other end of the spectrum, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and their satellites have found that without repressive control, they can't maintain the control needed to make their socialist economies work.
The right place for the economy is somewhere in the middle: some activities need to be nationalized in order to work well: the military, the police, the highway system, pensions, etc., and others need to be strongly regulated: banking, common carriers and a number of others. But we need to give private business as much freedom to innovate as we can, right up to the point that it becomes a problem. The problem, it seems to me, comes whenever it is necessary to coerce a sizable population, whether by force or through propaganda or some more subtle means, to maintain a status quo.
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