But someone might take a chance on him for a couple dollars an hour in a job that doesn't require much trust.
So the employer gets someone to work for almost nothing and the rest of us get another person who requires government support to live.
No. The argument is the same with child labor and ultimately slave labor. You could say that as long as slaves worked on the plantation, they were fed, which is probably better than starving, so slavery was a worthwhile institution. You could say "well, slaves didn't have a choice", but we know that having a choice between working for $3 per day and starvation is no choice at all. We have seen a surprising number of workers in Chinese factories who have decided that working for $3 day under horrible conditions is not different enough from starving to death to want to stay alive.
The fact that in 2011, after 30 years of family incomes declining, we actually have right-wing politicians trying to repeal child labor laws, should tell you everything you need to know about the agenda that is behind the effort to reduce the minimum wage. Let's see...1) Get rid of safety regulations, 2) get rid of laws forbidding child labor, 3) attack unions, 4) do away with minimum wages. It's all part of a whole.
Raising the minimum wage has a multiplying effect for every dollar by which the minimum goes up. That money is always immediately spent in the economy, which makes it more likely that other people who might fall below the threshold for desirable employee will get a chance to work.
When you raise the minimum wage, it does not only raise the standard of living for the worker. It raises the standard of living for the community. More people get jobs when the minimum wage goes up, not fewer.
The first minimum wage law in the US came in 1938. It was part of the milieu of the New Deal. the following decades were the years of greatest growth, greatest prosperity, social advances, growing middle class, improved education, more social mobility and more equitable income distributions. I'm not saying that minimum wage was responsible for all or even any of those outcomes, but they were part of it. The minimum wage contributed to the best economic years in this country's history, along with the rest of the New Deal policies. That's why they are so amazingly popular, even today, even in the face of Fox News 24/7 in peoples' homes.
When the minimum wage goes away or goes down, it is not to accommodate the "low-value" worker, it is to lower the wages of all workers. When the minimum wage goes down, it's not just the pay of the lowest part of the employment scale that goes down, it's everyone right up to middle-management. It is you. Without a minimum wage, you would make less money, too.