I've run into a strong number of people who share some political ideologies usually centric around anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism as well, that minimum wages should never be increased.
What?
Sure, I disagree with the structure of our present governing body and the financial structure on which it relies on...but to say that the working poor shouldn't be protected from INCREASED financial slavery seems inhumane, and incompassionate to our fellow man. We already know that businesses WILL pay lower wages when they can get away with it in the illegal immigrant workforce which is most often utilized for cheap labor. So to assume businesses would operate in a fair and moral manner concerning wages is simply an illusion.
The principles from my understanding of people who oppose raising minimum wages, or having minimum wages at all seem to me, skewed, misled and great potential for unforeseen negative impact. Primarily the concept(which is a plausible one, I don't disagree) is that raising labor costs increases product/service cost for the customer. Which is a fair point. Because the persons who actually reap the profits from a company's revenue DON'T want their profit margins to shrink. -I will address this towards the end of the article
Here's where I take issue; living costs are going up whether you like them to or not due to inflation/devaluation of currency. So, what do the working poor do to survive on too-low wages? They seek welfare. Yes, there is a large portion of working people on welfare in the U.S. Welfare is obviously tax-funded. So this is very clearly what's happening, plain and simple...
The worker needs to afford their basic life necessities(housing, food, etc), and minimum wage isn't actually survivable anywhere in the U.S., so what the worker cannot afford, the government is supplementing. If you include this welfare income into the worker's monthly income, you'd look at that welfare as a percentage and their salary/labor wages as another percentage.
THAT WELFARE PERCENTAGE IS WHAT THE COMPANY/EMPLOYER IS SAVING IN PROFITS.
Yes, since the tax payer is footing the rest of the worker's wages that the employer is not paying, the employer gets to retain those unpaid wages as profits. I simply cannot find a justification for this by any means, whatsoever. As the title of this article states, "who's responsible for paying an employee"? If you can answer that question, you can answer whether paid wages should be higher or not. This can ALL be more deeply debated and elaborated on, but for the sake of length, I will keep this brief and simply reply to observations at another time.
in regard to rising labor costs increasing product/service costs
There remains the question of, what of labor costs and it's impact on consumer costs? If We as a society mandate that employers must pay the wages of workers, not tax payers, we get into the cycle of the employer simply raising their price. Which in turn raises living costs. So what is to be done? How do you PREVENT a business from passing costs to consumers? Any feasible idea would violate some basic principles of the American Dream and capitalist ideals. A possible route I could postulate would be requiring companies to re-invest a certain percentage AFTER profits back into their laborforce and/or things to improve the working environment for their work force. This again is rather deep into the realm of "government control", and could easily carry some vulnerabilities. But again, what is another solution? We cannot simply say, "let the free market decide", because we have already covered the fact that companies WILL exploit people willing to work for less. So relying on the "good nature" of people and corporations doesn't come across as a sound strategy. Since this is something I ponder on time to time, I will pass all these questions on to the reader. Good luck. It takes questions, to encourage people to find solutions in order for us to progress cognitively and collectively as a society.