Firms can pay that statutory minimum wage without losing employment because they’re not losing any money off those employees—they’re extracting all that money *on top of* whatever value the employee would be generating if paid $16-18 per hour.
All that money constitutes a massive subsidy by employees to employers, enforced by the state, in a titanic distortion of the “free” market. Hypothetically, even taking at face value all the tropes of capitalist ideology, we could raise minimum wages to the Danish level with no impact on employment.
Of course, all of capitalism is predicated on massive state violence to immiserate people and transform them into a proletariat with no choice but to labor for wages, a titanic subsidy to capitalists that eliminates the possibility of there being a “fair” wage at all. But even ignoring all this and pretending that wages are set by market forces, we find that minimum wage laws are a a marginally corrective bandaid on the primary distortion.
7/end