If government intervention would prevent such a thing, I would countenance it. But please understand that the entire essay was written to emphasize the sheer tonnage of that which we do not know and to beg for a wee bit of humility from both sides. I'm not sure that economics is a science that could be put to the scientific method and yield Newtonian predictability.
But that's my point. It does.
At least with all previous attempts by any known government to influence the economy and "fix things", and not just American government either, it has always made the situation worse.
Dr. Thomas Sowell's excellent Basic Economics illustrates that fact far better than I can.
After reading some of your posts, I’d like to add my thoughts hopefully for some clarification. Economics is a science where you can only say what one thing will do to a situation when everything else is held constant. In other words, it’s very relative. When someone says the minimum wage causes unemployment, they mean that it will push unemployment higher than it otherwise would have been. This comes from logical reasoning. If the minimum wage gets pushed to $6/hr from $5/hr, workers who were worth more than $5/hr but less than $6/hr will be unemployed because they represent a greater cost to the business than what they bring in.
However, at the same time it’s possible that other factors occur that put downward pressure on the unemployment rate. If these downward pressures are greater than the upward pressure caused by the minimum wage increase, the unemployment rate may go down. If you were only to look at the minimum wage increase and see unemployment go down, you would fallaciously come to the conclusion that minimum wages either don’t affect unemployment, lessen it. A good economist can separate causes and effects and will not look at empirical data without qualification.
Government intervention makes things worse not because we can empirically observe this in every case, but because of the logical reasoning behind it. Any dollar spent by the government must be taken from the private sector either through taxing or borrowing (inflation steals purchasing power by the same amount). The government has no profit motive to keep costs low and expenditures efficient. What is spent by the public sector is largely arbitrary and lacks a true price system because spending is not based on consumer demand.
I do not believe that economics however is a predictive science. We can say that one policy will be harmful in relative terms, but not by how much. For instance, if we increase the supply of apples, the price of apples will be lower than it otherwise would have been, but we can not say if this will amount to an absolute reduction in the price or when the price change will take place or by how much the price changes.