[aabeshou]

I'm sorry, I misunderstood your tone as challenging, like "who is anyone to say what is fair or not?"

technically in the U.S. there is a federal (nation-wide) minimum wage, then there are minimum wages for each state. I am not sure how they are defined, e.g. the federal one is certainly not automatically pegged to inflation. there is a movement to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour but even that is hard or impossible to live on in many areas.

[dpoochieni]

The effects of raising minimum wages are twofold: long-term businesses will invest more in automation as it will be more profitable; short-term they might fire one or two people who might make sense at 12 but say now at 15 it does not. Actually think about how it affects different size business, large corporations can easily afford the automation, fire many people as they have many others. A small business having to fire someone is more drastic. In the end, you might have big corporation owners doing better, and impoverished small business owners, while not really improving the situation of the employees.

[aabeshou]

arguably, a business that pays someone less than a living wage doesn't deserve to operate, just as a business that can't exist without using slaves doesn't deserve to operate

[dpoochieni]

Yeah but those people still have to eat no? Bad job is better than no job (Granted, not talking about extremely bad)