When you demand to be paid $15 per hour while demanding to import people who will do the same job for $5 per hour

A Rambo meme that deserves a Rambo up vote.

by pushing the socialist agenda for $15/hr for the minimum job (typically manual labor service), it incentives service companies to hire "contractor" companies to hire illegals. The whole California farming, landscaping and construction is built on this model. The socialist left wants illegal immigration and pushing for a huge jump in federal minimum wage helps that goal.

:0)

I've no problem establishing a 'living wage' for people who are not financial dependents. Anyone who is claimed as a dependent though by definition doesn't need to work for a living.

Besides, the penalty for lying under that system would be tax fraud, so it would arguably be pretty secure.

I have a major problem with the government tampering with the economy. The minimum wage is bad enough and it was NEVER meant as a living wage.

What I am in favor of is people taking responsibility for their own lives and making themselves (either by education, experience or both) more valuable to an employer.

No one is entitled to a wage. A wage is what an employer gives you for the work you do for him/her. The work you should equal the money you are paid. If that is not enough money for you then either you negotiate more pay from your employer, you find a different employer who pays more for that same kind of work or you learn a skill or improve you ability to contribute to the company.

The employer/employee relationship is no different than when you shop for food at a grocery store. If you look at an apple that is bruised then you don't buy it. That apple has to meet the standards you set. If the store charges too much for that apple you actually can negotiate (even though hardly anyone ever does that in this country) with the checker or store manager or for a lower price or you can leave and shop somewhere else.

In the above scenario you are the employer and you are trying to hire an apple to perform the task of tasting good, providing you with it's nutrients and stopping you from getting hungry. You want the hire the best apple at the most affordable price. So does a human resources department. They want to hire the best employee at a wage that does not cause the business to suffer. That even means the CEO who they are paying millions of dollars to. The board of directors would not pay that wage if they did not thing they could get that much or more value to the company from that CEO.

The value of the labor you perform is NOT the same as your value as an individual. Your value as an individual is priceless. What you can do for someone else is you are paid for.

Every time the government gets involved prices go up and people lose their jobs. When they set the minimum wage originally that is what happened and every time they have raised it prices go up and people lose their jobs. Some how in the last 10 to 15 years someone started saying that the minimum wage was a living wage. It never was.

While I agree with the mentality that no one is entitled to a wage (and that a person is worth more as an individual than their paycheck), I feel it's not unreasonable to ensure that people who do work, and work hard, aren't being shortchanged by their employers. While it is largely possible to negotiate pay raises (people these days are generally pretty decent) or switch jobs, there absolutely are situations where a worker may be taken advantage of.

One idea I've been bouncing around in my head, though I've no idea how it'd work, is to not only have the aforementioned dependency-status impact on pay, but let the employer themselves decided whether a position should be considered one 'career-worthy' or not. If not, then that position would not be subject to minimum wage requirements and it's purely a position in which the relationship between employee and employer (as you described) reigns supreme. If they do want to meet minimum wage requirements though then they should qualify for a tax credit of equal value as the increase cost in payroll. Ideally that incentivises businesses to increase pay for employees while keeping their costs from unnecessarily ballooning. Is it practical or necessarily the right solution? I dunno...I'm not a policymaker and I've not really thought this through. However I think it's a far better alternative than either relaxing the minimum wage requirement entirely or raising it to an absurd level like the oft-clamored for $15 an hour.

There will always be companies that take advantage of their workers just as there will always be companies that appreciate and reward their workers. No one is perfect, not even business owners. That is why a business that has a good product and a low price can go out of business. Business owners are just as flawed as everyone else.

But that is no excuse to ever involved the government because that compounds the problem. Partly because those who work in the government are also just humans and they are also flawed. So if you get politicians who don't know all of the facts making law then you get disaster. Or if you create an agency that is supposed to monitor businesses then they just get in the way.

You cannot stop bad things from happening with the government. You can create worse things with the government.

So that is why getting the government away from businesses and doing any kind of wage fixing is always going to create problems. The minimum wage, from the day it was first imposed, cost people their jobs and causes prices to increase.

Your idea is not a bad idea in our current circumstances. What is hard is to think out of our current mindset. We see a lot of the bad things that are happening business and we think if we pull the government completely out it will make things worse. It is easy to visualize that actually happening.

However, what will actually happen is things will get better. Maybe not at first but when businesses, especially large corporations, realize they can no longer rely on the government then they will have to scramble to actually make their products more competitive or the business will fail.

Then the value of their employees will become much more crucial to the success of the business. if their employees aren't happy then they will leave and the business will fail. That puts management is an extremely tight squeeze, which is something the large corporations haven't experienced as much because of the government. Now management will have to find a way to satisfy their customers AND their employees.

There is no need for a minimum wage. Certain jobs will be specifically for students and they will not pay very much but that will matter less because the cost of living will significantly improve. Prices will go down, innovation will increase and wages will go up.

It has happened before and it will happen again.

Is that the stand up comic Ron White in your meme?

The call me "tater salad".