This might be a better question for /r/AskSocialScience.

Student in economics here. The main argument of the opposition is that the higher wages will restrict the number of jobs available since employers have a finite amount of money to pay the employees with. The proponents say it will gives employees the ability to use the extra money to secure minimum needs and participate in the Market (and so, boosting Demand).

I can't give you specific historic proof for either, but I can give you a angle. What you're looking for is two things: employment numbers following minimum wage increases (say, after six months to two year for actual effects) and inflation. If there's no inflation, employers had the ability to pay. If there's is, well, its a lot more complicated.

Henry Ford raised his workers salaries right after the 1929 crash in a bid to secure a market for his cars, but the demand slumped so much, it was a drop of water in the ocean. Ford's (the company) income was not sufficient to counter the drop in the whole US workforce. But the idea was the same as the pro-increase of today.

World War two saw a huge increase in wages and employment, but prices too. In the end, it was a good thing (minus, you know, deaths and destruction) because the wages surpassed the inflation and thus the People enjoyed a de facto increase in their fortunes (GDP per capita exploded).

In 1980, Demand was pretty much saturated (individuals who could afford things had stuffed their houses of things, and had savings on the side for more things, and dreamed of more things), but inflation was rampant and rapidly destroying wealth. An increase in wages wouldn't have stopped the bleeding. The Reagan policies focused on boosting Offer (investments in military, aeronautics, the Internet) to get an updated economy which could match the households' Demand. The rest was just politics; sorry unions.

TL;DR: it depends on context, but you can simplify has: increase wages if 1) workers need it (as opposed to want it) and 2) the economic situation would be better off. There's no constant in historic data that wages increase is always the best/worst response.

Edit: it's full grammar errors, yeah phones

The minimum wage debate has been going on for many decades. It's a really difficult one to assess in econometric terms, mostly because the unintended consequences of economic policy can manifest themselves in so many ways, and some of which will only manifest themselves in the readily-visible sectors many years after the policy has started. For example, if there is a bias in an economy towards producing things that are not sold directly to the pubic, but to companies in other countries that use them to make things that are then sold to the public. So, it's not always a case of (if var1 > x then var2 = y).

However, the first in-depth calculation of the effects of price manipulation (which imposing a minimum price on a labour market is) was done by a student of Carl Menger (famous for his marginal utility theory of value) called Ludwig von Mises. In 1921, he published an in-depth study of the new soviet socialist system, called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" in which he argues that prices in transactions represent something more than just a transfer of wealth. They represent a flow of information.

In other words, his core argument was that prices are signals, and the only way to understand them is to treat them as a wholistic set, or price matrix. The price matrix is the aggregate, dispersed information that the multitude of market players have regarding the interaction of the group as a whole in its interaction with resources of all kinds, the total sum of resources available and the most efficient way of allocating those resources to produce the maximum amount of value. You can think of the price matrix as something similar to the chemical signals that ants or bees give each other in order for the superorganism ( the "hive") to maximise the resources at its disposal. Put simply, when the price of something goes up in one place, a signal is spread through the matrix that more of a particular resource needs to be allocated to it. There is a total amount of information that the ants collectively know, but no individual ant has that information, it is dispersed over the many ants that form the colony.

I'll cut the story short, because it's a very deep subject, but Mises's assessment was that the price manipulation that was practiced in the Soviet model gave it a fundamental disadvantage vs. other models, not so much because of increased prices or other such consequences, but because the manipulation of prices effectively silences the economy's most valuable resource: information i.e. the information contained within price movements. If it doesn't silence it, then it'll distort the message to such a degree as to report back useless information. If the price matrix is the thing your economy relies on to "know" how to best allocate scarce resources, its absence is the equivalent of a ship navigating without a compass, or without a fuel monitor. His estimate was that the Soviet system would become steadily more inefficient until its political actors would dominate its economic actors, resulting in ever greater coercion, which would spiral the system into a cycle of poverty until it loses support of all actors (economic and political) and simply implodes.

His estimate (in 1921) was that the system would last about 50 years. However, it must be noted that, even though the Soviet model had no internal price matrix, it still had a reference of other economies which, being largely unmanipulated market economies, gave a good indication of prices and production levels. So, access to that information meant that the Soviet model could survive 20 years longer than it did.

I understand that you were asking about specific cases of minimum wage policy. The point of this comment is to show you that unintended consequences are not quite as simple, that there is a bigger, wholistic matrix that the labour market is just a part of, and that the more important negative side effects aren't just what politicians discuss in terms of price increases, but the silencing of price information that market manipulation entails.