>> So, by your logic, the higher the better? Should the minimum wage be $50 an hour? $100 an hour? <<
I said nothing of the sort, nor anything from which any reasonable person could infer anything of the sort. But I’ll explain myself anyway:
If we did away with the welfare state and government-subsidized illegal immigration, and instead enforced immigration law, I would be all for the market set the wage. My problem is that by having taxpayers pay living costs for low-income workers, we’re subsidizing business to pay wages far below what anyone could otherwise afford to accept. So what should the minimum wage be? Well, it should be enough that taxpayers wouldn’t have to subsidize the cost of living.
I do NOT think there should necessarily be a single minimum wage; it could increase with length of service with a company and required education: A burger flipper at McDonald’s is so terribly low-skilled that any English speaker should be able to move up from it to something else. Anyone who speaks English (NO ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION!!!) should be able to do something far more skilled by the time he is 28, the median age for someone to first be both married and having kids. If he’s been working at McDonald’s since he’s 17, I’d hope he’d be at least an evening manager within 11 years. Of course, locally, most McDonald’s are staffed by non-English-speaking immigrants who are typically far older.
I think you have misjudged the impact of LEGAL immigration on low skill wages in the USA.
Since 1990, America has issued 27 million Green Cards, mostly to low skill, low education workers who speak English as a second language.
That fact alone - completely independent of illegal immigration, completely independent of outsourced factory jobs - has crushed the wage scale for low skill American workers.
What competitive effects do you foresee from your plan? You are not dealing with perfectly spherical businesses in a vacuum, as the physicists say...