Minimum wage laws should not exist.

This was a great debate. I had a ball discussing this topic with you, I think we both made good points, and I believe we both had logical, valid arguments. I understand that there are avenues that you can take that don't include college to make a good living. What your point doesn't address is the people that still MUST work in menial jobs. These jobs need to be filled or society doesn't work. If there were enough good jobs that only high school students were left to do the menial jobs then that would be okay, because those high school students would still be supported by their parents. Unfortunately, there are people trying to support families on those jobs. As far as self-reliance goes, the minimum wage doesn't have anything to do with self-reliance, it has everything to do with fairness. We had a minimum wage in the 1940's and unless I'm wrong, I thought that the generation that lived through the depression and won World War II was pretty self-reliant. I guess they weren't self-reliant enough to live without a minimum wage though. My point about managers is not that they are useless, it's that we overvalue their importance. There are a few examples of great managers, and you've listed some. I could run out a laundry list of managers that ran their company in the ground while banking millions of dollars in salary and bonuses. I think that you understand my point, though, so I won't do that. Just as a head coach of a football team is an important piece of the puzzle, I believe that they get too much credit when the team is good and too much blame when the team is bad. It is the players on the field that must perform. The same is true of CEOs, they make important decisions, but companies would fail if they had no work force. A company's goal is always going to be to pay the lowest amount of wages possible and still have people interested in working for them. That is how business works, lowering wages lowers overhead and means more profit. That means there must be a check on a company's natural tendancy to do this. The minimum wage helps the economy as well, if the minimum wage were destroyed the economy would suffer greatly. The economy is always strongest when the middle class is strongest, because there are millions of middle-class people and they are all raveneous consumers, which drives the economy. If the minimum wage were eliminated many people would fall out of the middleclass, because as the minimum wage dropped the salaries of other employees would drop as well. There would exist a casam between those that made millions and the rest of us. This would destroy society as we know it. As to my point about hard work. What I'm saying is that CEOs and hedge fund managers are rewarded on a much higher scale than other employees for the work they do. I'm not saying what they do is easy, but it doesn't produce anything. There is no tangable good that they produce. They have an ability to manipulate numbers and create wealth for their company doing so. The reason that we are in the economic mess we are in now is because this line of thinking got out of hand and it was pushed too far. What I'm saying is that we used to reward people that actually made something useful, like a car, or a television or a table. That is what we should be rewarding, that is what matters. It is a mistake to put too much faith into the paper wealth created by stock market gurus. The real wealth exists in what you can make. Take the bailout for example, the bankers and insurance companies got whatever they wanted. They produce absolutely NOTHING. When the car companies went to Washington they were made to feel like dogs and they had to agree to a host of stipulations before they got any money. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be stipulations when the government is giving out billions of dollars, what I'm saying is that I find it interesting that they treated the bankers so much differently. The car companies actually produce a real good, something I can see and touch. We have already lost our ability to make shoes and televisions in this country because we started letting other countries dominate us in those fields. If we let our ability to make cars die then we are going to be giving another huge industry over to someone else, probably China and Japan. Then what? What will we be actually able to produce in this country? That is what I'm talking about when I say rewarding work. It's how it used to be done in the fourties and fifties. Those times didn't seem so bad. The minimum wage is a necessary check on corporate greed, pure and simple. Instead of hurting the economy is actually helps it by giving people enough money to purchase the very goods they are helping produce. Which is the other aspect of eliminating a minimum wage. You said that if the minimum wage was eliminated companies would be able to hire more people and produce more goods. While that might be true, they would also sell fewer goods because people would have much less money to buy things. Since they would be selling less, they would have to lay-off some people, which would cause sales to fall even more. You can see where this is going. Eventually there would be an equilibrium and we would have probably a slightly higher unemployment rate than we do now (because people would be making less and thus be able to buy less) and people would be poorer than they are now, that's all that would happen. I understand that many people think the government isn't a solution to every problem, and I agree, but the government has to do something right, it can't be all bad, or else how would it have lasted as long as it has, and how would we be able to be such a successful country? This was a fabulous debate; I had a lot of fun with it.