Price floors must be set above the current and expected market price, if they are not, they become redundant.
Price floors reduce consumption.
The government in the U.K understands that:
Minimum alcohol prices will reduce the alcohol consumed.
But does not seem to want to understand:
Minimum wages will reduce the amount of workers employed.
Someone who is pro minimum alcohol prices and pro jobs, to be consistent, must be against minimum wages as the same logic applies to both policies. Government doesn't seem to get this so what's really going on?
Here's what happens when currency controls have been put in place. http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/9212749/Empty-flights-all-booked-solid
However, there is indeed widespread support for this idea that government should set the price of labour. This shows a basic failure to grasp basic reasoning (the real foundation of economics is logical reasoning – not “studies” whether pro or anti minimum wage edict) – the idea that one can raise wages by passing an edict, is as insane the idea that one can reduce the price of bread by passing an edict. Sadly statists (kings as well as mobs) have believed this for thousands of years.
Interventions typically have unintended consequences . Controlling by law the price of milk may be intended to keep the milk prices low, but the result is to create shortages of milk. Usually because no one can make money by selling at the fixed price. This makes milk harder to find, causes long lines, fosters black markets and corruption, and makes the full cost consumers bear higher (price + waiting in line + bribes). Then the state steps in again to ration the scarce goods “fairly”, and passes new laws to stop black market dealing in them. We see this happen for bread, fuel, and rented accommodation. Ultimately, the outcome is clear: if you fix the price, you only succeed in choking off the supply and making the shortage even worse. This leads to more calls for intervention and the cycle begins.
A system of interventionism, which can be changed by bureaucrats or politicians at their fancy , and in which "no man who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow," is decidedly not a system of regulation.