You think raising the minimum wage helps workers and the poor? Think again. It makes a lot of unskilled work illegal. Thus it takes the ability of the low-skilled to earn and puts them on welfare.
But what about a “living wage”? Many of the low-skilled are new entrants to the work force. Youth and high school graduates, who are working at an entry level job but won’t be forever. Thus a minimum wage job for many is a living wage if you are living with your parents.
Does taking a $7 an hour job and making it illegal suddenly make that worker who loses his job worth $9 per hour? What decides what a worker’s labor is worth? It is a bureaucrat sitting in his ivory tower? No, bureaucrats cannot decide what anything is worth. That’s why the Soviet Union collapsed, as all economic decisions were made by bureaucrats.
How are wages and other prices determined then? They are determined by every economic decision of every participant in the economy. So if someone is working at a minimum wage job, it is because all of the decisions of all of the people have determined that is what the job is worth.
If the job was worth more and the minimum wage worker was getting paid less than he was worth, then that worker would quit and get that higher paying job.
It is not a conspiracy of business owners to hold down wages, rather it is the joint decision of all the purchasers of products to not by products where labor costs are too high. Business owners don’t want to enslave workers. They want to make a profit. To make a profit they have to attract workers and pay them what they are worth, or they quit.
You can try to control prices by laws, but all you do is make certain labor or certain products and services illegal.
Where is the hue and cry for a “living profit”, where any business owner is “entitled” to a living simply because he wants one. With a mandatory “minimum profit” law, you would have to force everybody to buy products they don’t want at prices they do not agree to pay. We have not degenerated so far as to get to that point as yet! (Except with Obamacare.)
There is no hue and cry because it is obviously not right to make laws for minimum profits … except in the utilities, the banks, the auto industry, educational system, and soon heath care and day care and all other regulated industries ….
Minimum wage laws mean certain people don’t work and certain jobs don’t get done. They do not mean that by waving the wand of legislative fiat that certain work more valuable, unless you live under Socialism.