Minimum wage laws should not exist.

I understand your point about Sinapore, but the difference is Sinapore has a fraction of the population that the United States does and not nearly as large an economy. Canada does suffer from slightly higher unemployment than the United States, but their quality of life index is higher than the United States's. I see what you're saying Ben, but the difference in our arguments is that you are arguing paper facts and not putting them in a real-world scenario. You argue that business owners would be shooting themselves in the foot to pay an unethical wage and yet Walmart does it. Not only do they do it, but they get employees. Since we are talking about the minimum wage I think it would be helpful to point out that minimum wage jobs are jobs that you don't need a college education to get. In many cases, you don't need a high school education to qualify for these jobs either. When you have a college degree and you are looking for work, Ben's idea of supply and demand works perfectly. Businesses are looking for people that can help them grow and those people (because of a college degree) have certain skill sets that are valuable to the company. Companies will compete for managers or PR people or even HR reps. This causes the wages in those jobs to be competetive, because buisnesses want to lure the best and brightest. Minimum wage jobs don't hold any of those same benefits to the workers. Minimum wage jobs take litlte to no skill to fill. In many cases companies are just looking for warm bodies to do some menial tasks. If someone doesn't want the job, they don't care because they know that someone will always come looking for job. The problem with Ben's argument is that the supply of workers in our country is always going to out pace the demand of companies to hire people. There are simply too many workers are not enough jobs. This means that the balance of power will always slide to the employer. If we eliminate the minimum wage the price of goods might come down (although, knowning the way that businesses work, I doubt this would be the case because once people are used to paying a certain price for something businesses will only raise prices from there) but even if prices do come down wages will go down with them. Employeement might go up slightly but more people will be living below the poverty level. We have seen what happens in this country when the businesses are given all the breaks and are allowed to write their own rules. It only ends up in ruin, because capitalism, unchecked, will always destroy itself. I'm going to take this last little bit to discuss an alternate solution to the problem. This isn't really part of the argument at hand but it might help you to better understand my point. Minimum wage laws were put into place to establish a standard of living for people. Since their inception the minimum wage has never kept up with the actual cost of living. This is because businesses have raised their prices to create more wealth for themselves. But why do we have a country and a form of government? Is it to make businesses rich or is it to help the people of our own nation? The reason that the NFL is the best run league in the history of sports is because they have a salary floor, a salary cap and limit on corporate earnings via profit sharing. Everyone that works with the NFL wins because of this wonderful balance. I believe that we should institute something like this in business. Now, it woudl be almost impossible to create a revenue sharing program in the real world so this is what I would propose: A minimum wage that keeps up with the cost of living. A salary cap (I don't have a specific number in mind) that controls wages that can be earned by the top CEOs of companies. This will do more than abolishing the minimum wage to keep prices of goods down because of the huge salaries and bonses that CEOs get. It will also make the argument of competition for CEOs moot as each company will have a salary cap. This would also force companies to improve their practices for their employees because CEOs (like NFL players) would have many things to take into consiideration when selecting a job. A sliding scale on the top prices that companies could charge for goods and services. This scale would not be applicable to all goods and services but only those that are neccessary for survival, like food. I believe that this would be the most beneficial solution for everyone. Companies would still make great profits, CEOs would still get great salaries and employees would be able to support their families. This would decrease the burder of the government to support peopel via welfare and would free up money for the government to spend on neccessary programs without running into as much debt.