[E]conomic laws … are not relations between earlier and later events, but rather between actual and counterfactual events … There is no guarantee, for example, that a minimum wage law will cause unemployment in the sense of making unemployment higher than it was before the law; for the level of unemployment is influenced by many different factors, some countervailing. What economic law does guarantee is that the level of unemployment will be higher under a minimum wage law than it
would have been without the law.
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