The basic problem is that, given automization and efficient corporate models, we have way way more citizens than the number of employees we actually need to keep things running. However, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid, so we have to make up things like middle management and ‘greeters’ and so forth in order to make sure most people are allowed to eat. Our society doesn’t have a real solution to this problem (which will only get worse in the future), but minimum wage is one of the ways we keep everyone starving to death. I think that if we really let the market dictate the price of labor, huge segments of the population wouldn’t get paid a living wage, and whole sections of various cities would degenerate from slums into actual third-world-level squalor.

I think someone needs to “Helpl” Steve’s spelling.

I completely agree with Steve here. Why not have jobs that pay crap wages? Teens and poor people would take the jobs and learn valuable skills. Teens generally have their parents to help support them, and for poor people a crappy job is better than no job. Besides, it’s not like employers hold a gun to your head to make you work–if you don’t feel the pay is adequate for what you are doing, then quit. Work somewhere else.

The government should not dictate how much people are paid.