Many people spend their whole lives in minimum wage jobs, for whatever reason they are not able to get another one. For some people waiting tables or working in a call centre is their life and all they know how to do. Should they be denied things like healthcare and the ability to have children? Should their children be denied basic things?
Fine if you want to say that there should be no full time waiting staff because it is economically not possible to do that job and survive unless you are something like a student topping up your wages, I'm fine with that, but what you're saying then is that some people can earn less than a living wage because that is not for them how they support themselves - again fine; but if the outcome of this is that starbucks needs to pay its regular staff more than a pittance and therefore there isn't one on every corner then I'm fine with that.
Take a step back, I don't care about how this is achieved but I think as a society some basic things need to be catered for, because I don't want to live in a society of people starving on the street or dying of trivial medical problems, or even quite complex yet treatable medical problems.
However I am quite aware that because resources are scarce we can't hand out this standard of living to absolutely everyone, you need to do something to earn it. That is an advantage of doing this via a minimum wage; seriously what are the consequences of what i propose? No more need for obamacare, The cost of flipping burgers means that junk food becomes more expensive to match its societal cost.
The reality is, the more you increase the minimum wage, the more people you make unemployable, since employers will tend to only hire those that are worth $15/hour
That says to me that the current situation is already unsustainable and the only thing papering over the cracks is those people currently in that situation are effectively wage slaves living for less than is sustainable. If the employer cannot afford to employ someone to have a western standard of living then that job has no right to exist in the western world. Either that or we fess up as a society and state we are happy with exploiting people and economically forcing them to live at a lower standard of living so we can have a big mac.
Take your pick, you can either say you are happy for those who flip burgers to live at below western standards (i.e. no healthcare no pension, food shortages etc) or you can say that this is not acceptable to us and people should be paid enough to survive even if this means some fringe groups can't exist by exploiting people.
The only way out of this I know is to have a full welfare state providing a minimum acceptable level of living (this could be quite low) and then remove the minimum wage alltogether.
Seriously what fix would you prefer?