One of the great mistakes made by public officials is that they think economic forces are more or less fixed and unchanging.

They typically believe an x percent increase in a tax rate will result in a corresponding x percent increase in revenue, not realizing that tax increases inspire changes in behavior from those that are meant to pay higher taxes. For example, the new bill that will expose Amazon to California sales tax due to the presence of its small affiliates in the state is expected by its authors to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. But that money will never make it to Sacramento coffers if Amazon follows through on its threat to terminate its relationship with said affiliates.

That sort of behavior cannot be predicted in whatever estimates the "experts" cooked up.

Similarly, public officials are also constantly worried about monopolies (unless the monopoly is one of their campaign contributors). However, since the only constant in life is change, "monopolies" tend to disappear on their own over time, which means they weren't really monopolies to begin with. Smith Corona  had a monopoly on typewriters. Who cares if a firm had a monopoly on buggy whips? Microsoft supposedly had a monopoly as well, and look where they are.

Those sorts of changes don't show up in the reports or projections that public policymakers rely on.

The Ventura County Supervisors (save Foy) are guilty of the same one-dimensional mindset. They voted 3-1 to increase the minimum wage paid to government workers to $10 an hour (plus benefits).

On paper, they gave a raise to county workers making that minimum wage. However, because economic forces that don't show up in projections are always at play, the increase in minimum wage will lead to unemployment.

If a worker's labor is only worth $9/hour, they may find themselves employable if the minimum wage is $9/hour. If it's raised to $10/hour--they have a problem, since businesses tend not to hire people whose labor isn't worth what they are paying.

This is especially harmful to teenagers and the uneducated--private employers won't eagerly hire unskilled high school students if the state is forcing them to pay wages that are more appropriate for someone who is older and more skilled.

The county's minimum wage increase only affects public employees, but the same market forces are at play, even though governments are much more likely to pay employees more than their labor is worth. In the county's case, it will spend $145,000 on employees making minimum wage. The extra expense will have to come out of somewhere else. Perhaps three fewer minimum wage workers will be hired next year.