There ought to be a government-mandated minimum wage.

Thank you, brian, for your response. Ignoring the off-topic discussion of education, the first contention is that Bob will only hire people if he "absolutely" had to. However, this is false. An employer will hire an employee as long as the employee brings in more revenue to the business, using the employer's building and materials, than the employer pays the employee. Both parties must profit from the transaction. Bob is looking into adding a new check-out line at his store. He predicts that this added line, requiring him to hire one additional employee, would bring in about $6 per hour. Therefore, he will only hire a cashier if their wage is less than $6 per hour. Joe wants to be that cashier, and is willing to work for $5.50 per hour, because he needs a job to sustain himself while at the local community college. However, because the government said that Bob must pay $7 per hour, he cannot hire Joe. Therefore, Joe is unemployed, Bob gets less revenue, Bob's customers must wait longer in line, the government collects fewer taxes, and everybody loses. The employment, as you can see, is conditional to the minimum wage, opposing brian's suggestion. The minimum wage indeed causes unemployment. I even sourced business owners lamenting this everybody-loses scenario. Brian mentions the rival stores, that are also handicapped by the minimum wage. They are also unable to hire more cashiers for more check-out lines. Therefore, none of the stores can expand, leading to longer lines everywhere. If the minimum wage is eliminated, it only takes one of a dozen stores to add a new check-out line, shortening waiting times and attracting customers from rival stores. This will compel other stores to also hire more cashiers to get their customers back. With no net change in customers, no stores will have an overall increase in revenue, but more people will be employed, and there will be shorter lines in all of the stores. If there aren't any more potential cashiers to hire, then the demand for cashiers will instead drive the wages of the cashiers up before settling on a fair market price. My opponent goes on something of a tangent regarding competition from foreign countries, but I don't think Bob will be looking to move his store overseas, and cashiers and most other workers must be hired locally, making international competition completely and utterly irrelevant. Brian makes a single final claim that the minimum wage is necessary "for financially-exploited workers to live the dignified lives that all hard-working, law-abiding Americans Citizens deserve." However, 98.5% of all working Americans make above the minimum wage [1], and those that do are only making that much temporarily. Current minimum wage jobs are entry-level jobs that allow the workers to show their ability to work and climb up the economic ladder. If business owners weren't willing to pay above the minimum wage where it is due, then everybody would be making the minimum wage. It is also certainly much better to hire a hard-working, law-abiding American Citizien for an amount that some beurocrats in Washington think is slightly too low than for that same American to have no employment at all, instead kicked to the street to stand in line at the soup kitchen and the welfare line, tragically degrading into a lazy leech all because of the government-imposed minimum wage. Thank you, voters, for reading this debate, and thank you, brian_eggleston, for taking this debate, and good luck with your final round! [1] http://talkofliberty.com...