I'm gonna try to really suss out this whole minimum wage thing since Biden seems to want to pass a national $15 an hour minimum wage via executive order.
Okay...
Assumption one: Business owners are a bunch of greedy, rapacious capitalists who only care about money. (That's not what I think. It seems to be what socialists and the advocates for the minimum wage law think; so, for the sake of argument, I'll hold this as gospel.)
Assumption two: (not so much an assumption as an observation of logic) If assumption one is true, than a dramatic increase in the minimum wage would reduce the number of people whose labor businesses can profit off of.
So, yeah, a lot of people decry the fact that some employed people still qualify for government assistance.
Why is this a big deal?
I'm an anarchist and I don't like the government doing anything; but, if you believe that government has some value and part of that value is helping people out when they're down on their luck, wouldn't you prefer the tax payer to be footing part of a person's bill rather than all of it? Wouldn't you want people to be gaining work experience and possibly moving up the food chain with a little bit of help from the state rather than the person being a ward of the state?
Andrew Yang gained significant traction with his UBI proposal. I think that what Yang was proposing was financial suicide; but, some form of UBI has been proposed all the way from Yang to Milton Friedman. The difference is that Friedman proposed a UBI done by a negative income tax. Namely, say we take Yang's number of $1,000 per month, Yang wanted to just write $1,000 checks to everybody in the country over the age of eighteen; Friedman would have viewed $1,000 per month as the floor; so, if you only made $500 in a month, the government would make up the difference.
Let's add another assumption: Yang was being stingy. Again, I don't believe that; but, let's go with it for the sake of argument.
Let's set the minimum that any American should make a $20k per year.
Okay, what's the best way to do that via the aforementioned assumptions.
In order to reign myself in, I'm not gonna get into the multitude of government restrictions which cause barriers for entry into the workforce (ahem, occupational licensing) outside of the minimum wage.
For the sake of this argument, I'll take the popular and likely to happen proposal which is to simply make it illegal to pay people less than $15 per hour and pit it against something resembling Friedman's negative income tax.
I think that simply raising the minimum wage has a lot of support because it's simple, people forget that business owners don't all look like Bezos (who incidentally does pay a minimum of $15 per hour) and that some business owners look like Bob Belcher, and they think that it's better that greedy capitalists foot the bill rather than the tax payers.
I refer you to assumption one: that business owners are greedy capitalist pigs who only care about profits.
An IQ beneath 83 effectively bans you from military service. The US military has done extensive research on IQ over the last century and they set 83 as the absolute floor in which, if you go beneath that, the military doesn't have any jobs for you in which you wouldn't be a burden, a liability, or a danger. About 10% of men in this country have an IQ below 83. Are greedy capitalist pigs going to pay out $20k per year (I'm being generous to the other side because a $15 minimum wage at full time would be over $30k) to somebody that the military deems a liability?
Expanding this from that swath of the population with low IQ; how about people who just fucked up a lot in life? Is the greedy capitalist pig going to hire the high school drop out who got fired from his last job for stealing from it at $20k per year? The lower the legal wage is, the better shot that kid has to have good marks on his resume and dig himself out of the gutter.
If we go with the Friedman idea of a negative income tax, will some rapacious business owners abuse the system by paying their workers dimes per hour while the taxpayer handles the "living wage?" Yeah, I'm pretty certain it would happen. But, just in case you didn't notice, it's not like business are only hiring at minimum wage until people revolt. Businesses want to attract talent and offering a better amount of money is one of the best ways to do that.
Keeping the minimum wage low and implementing a negative income tax would allow the poorest, the most disadvantaged, and the unluckiest among us to survive while not cutting them out of the lowest paying, entry-level jobs and allow them to build up their skill sets to demand better wages.