I understand the microeconomic arguments here, and I agree that a minimum wage increase is actively destructive in a truly free labor market, and also destructive in our actual labor market. The cities where it has been implemented have seen sky rocketing rents as income effect pushes up the demand for housing, and the end result is that landlords end up collecting the value of the increase while the most vulnerable people see their jobs vanish.

With that said, merely opposing the minimum wage increase is not enough. People are in real economic pain, even before all the pandemic shutdown. While that pain is being caused by government distortion in the markets, it is also what is driving people to the left. We need be proactively countering the calls to "help people" with a higher minimum wage with calls for economic reforms that actually help people.

Housing, healthcare and education are the major pain points. There are real counter reform ideas here that would increase freedom.

Housing has skyrocketed in small part from government subsidy of mortgage debt (which increases house prices in the same way minimum wage increase rents), and in large part from rampant money printing causing asset inflation.

Education increases are caused by a flood of government money (mostly in the form of student loans), a cartel of educational institutions, and an outsourced economy that has gutted the middle class labor market. Arguably broken public education has made it so that four years of college is required to educate someone as well as they used to be out of high school. The problem isn't that we don't provide free college to everyone -- the problem is that we have an economy where everyone feels they need that degree.

Healthcare is the biggest issue, and the most directly government created. If you want to see the cost of our regulatory regime just compare the cost of a heart bypass for a human to that for a dog. We also allow a strict cartel to control the supply of doctors, "certificates of need" to control the supply of facilities, and an insurance system that is best described as privatized socialized medicine. Perhaps if we socialize anything it should be medical education (someone facetious there, but it's an argument that makes people think).

All of this is in the face of a decoupling of wages and productivity -- again arguably government created, as our entire legal system is tilted towards creating fewer and larger employers, both through regulatory overhead and direct tax incentives for corporations to use revenue to grow rather than issue dividends for more efficient reinvestments of profit.

TL/DR: Minimum wage increases are a bad idea, but they are being demanded because the economy is broken and people are suffering. If we want to fight the rise of a socialist state, we need to counter these demands with proposals to fix regulatory, fiscal and social policy in a way that actually makes people better off.