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This caught my eye:

[Arindrajit] Dube responds that “one has to be honest about not knowing what would be the impact in every place.” But he points to 2019 research by Anna Godoey and Michael Reich of the University of California at Berkeley, who found that increases in state minimums didn’t hurt employment even in low-wage counties where the new floor equaled 82% of the prevailing median wage. And even if a high minimum wage does kill some jobs—as many studies, though not Dube’s, show it would—it can still be worthwhile if it raises incomes of low-wage families overall, he says. Some experts say that as with free trade, which helps more people than it hurts, any losers could be made whole with government assistance.

Yes, free trade is an excellent analogy for labor market policy, but not for the reasons cited by Peter Coy in this Bloomberg article.

Economists typically evaluate issues from both an equity and efficiency perspective. Many economists favor policies that maximize efficiency (making the pie as large as possible), combined with some redistribution to compensate the losers. Thus they favor free trade, combined with a program to help workers that lose their jobs due to import competition.

Oddly, Peter Coy seems to think this analogy points in the direction of boosting the minimum wage. Exactly the opposite is true. If we wanted to match the standard economic approach to international trade, we’d abolish the minimum wage and replace it with some sort of subsidy for low wage workers. Even if that were politically impossible, you would definitely not want a $15 minimum wage. A much superior policy would be a $10 minimum wage combined with a $5/hour wage subsidy, where the subsidy phases out at the rate of 50 cents/hour for each $1/hour pay raise, ending entirely when pay reaches $20/hour. (Teenagers could be excluded from the subsidy if they are not living independently.)

I’m not saying this would be ideal (I’d prefer no legal minimum), but it would be much more in the spirit of the “free trade plus compensating the losers” analogy that Coy uses to justify a higher minimum wage. It would be aimed at making the pie as large as possible while compensating the less fortunate.