There ought to be a government-mandated minimum wage.

Thank you, Brian, for posting your argument, although your story seems far from realistic. My story, meanwhile, is actually visible in many instances across the country, as discussed here: http://www.foxbusiness.com... The incidents range from teenagers no longer getting their entry-level job to expensive robots replacing manual labor completely, killing jobs. Would you rather the employer hire a person for $5 per hour or a robot for $6? Now, regarding your story. Firstly, you make it seems as if Bob is a greedy, miserly store owner who almost deserves his eventual fate. This is far from true. Bob wishes that he could hire Joe, but government just isn't making it economical. Many employers honestly regret that they cannot save these people from unemployment. You claim that Joe opens up a new store to compete with Bob. This is doubtful, and Joe doesn't appear to be able to get even a minimum-wage job. Opening a store is rather complicated, and requires lots of work without seeing any real income for extended perionds of time. That just isn't going to happen. Secondly, Joe wouldn't be able to make his store more efficient by hiring the workers that Bob did not. The reason Bob did not hire Joe is because he realized that Joe wasn't worth the $7 per hour. If Joe ignores Bob's calculations, he will end up in the red, not in the green, and quickly realize why Bob couldn't hire him under the minimum wage laws. If Joe's plan does even better than Bob's plan, Bob, being more experienced than Joe, would have come up with Joe's plan years ago, and followed it accordingly. Logically, Joe cannot create a store that beats Bob's unless he has some hidden skill as a shop owner, which is rather unlikely, to say the least. Moving on further through the story, Mrs. Bob claims that Joe was able to help her where Bob couldn't. However, if Joe is busy opening up a new store and trying to gather customers, he will have just as little free time as Bob, if not less. Add the fact taht Joe will not put Bob out of business, and he will not be able to take away Bob's wife. Regarding Joe's decision not to hire Bob, the minimum wage is irrelevant. If Joe found a worker who is more efficient than Bob, then that worker will get the job. The minimum wage only means that if neither worker can be more efficient than the minimum wage, neither one can get the job. Finally, we come to the abolition of the minimum wage in the United States. The idea that wages would fall to rock bottom is egregrious. Even in third-world countries, first-world companies will pay up to seven times the local wage: http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com.... They could pay only twice as much, but they don't. They pay well more. If they were competing not with the low wages of third-world countries, but each other in America, the wages would sit not far from where they are now. The difference is that more people would be hirable who could not be feasibly hired before. So, our story ends not with the death of Bob, but Joe sitting in the soup kitchen, wishing he could actually do something with his life, when he sees a newspaper announcing that Congress has finally abolished the minimum wage. Elated, he goes to Bob, who hires him for $5.50 per hour, and with this entry-level job, Joe is slowly able to improve his worth until eventually he is happily promoted to assistant store manager. Both Bob and Joe are glad that the government is no longer destroying this mutually beneficial economic transaction. Thank you.