There ought to be a government-mandated minimum wage.

With thanks to Mongeese for his rebuttal, I actually agree with him when he asserts that my ‘little guy pulls himself up by the bootstraps at the expense of a greedy and exploitative businessman' scenario is highly unrealistic. He's right: even in the supposed ‘land of opportunity' a young man with drive and ability but without the benefit of an expensive education and not having access to private funding from a wealthy family would find it almost impossible to raise the finance to start a new business so, in reality, Joe would be almost certain to spend his foreseeable future in the poverty trap of low wages and unemployment, leaving Bob free to continue fobbing his customers off with a shoddy service. One day, things may change and education will be provided according to academic ability rather than the ability to pay but, until then, the rich kids will prosper and the devil will take the hindmost. Anyway, with regard to the minimum wage my opponent's economic analysis of the effects of the minimum wage is fundamentally flawed and the stories quoted courtesy of Fox Business are highly biased in favour of business owners, and here's why: The primary responsibility of any profit-making organisation is to maximise the returns on its shareholders investments and the best way to achieve this is to keep costs, including labour costs, to a minimum. Therefore, Bob would not employ someone if he didn't absolutely need to, whether the hourly rate were $5 or $7. If he did need an employee, he would employ one: either on a full- or part-time basis, as required. The fact that he would be legally obliged to pay the employee $7 per hour rather than what he, personally, felt the market rate should be, puts him at no competitive disadvantage because all the rival stores in the area are similarly obliged to pay the minimum wage. Of course, Bhobindra's Stores in Bombay, Bo-Bo Stores in Beijing and El Bobiï¿½o's Stores in Bogota are not obliged to pay their staff $7 per hour and could pass that cost saving on to their customers, but it seems an awfully long way to go for a loaf of bread and a pint of milk. Naturally, it is different for manufacturers with production facilities based in the US: but in order to compete with manufacturers in developing countries such as India, the government would not only have to abolish the minimum wage to allow firms to pay their workers the equivalent wage of the average Indian factory worker: INR1,600 (US$36) per month [1], but also to scrap the health and safety legislation that is designed to protect employees at work but which costs firms money to implement, and also turn a blind eye to the use of child labour. The US Federal Government could do all that but to do so would be to turn the clock back at least 150 years and the United States didn't rise to become the greatest economic power the world has ever known by undercutting rival countries on price - it did so by using innovation and ingenuity to produce products that weren't necessarily cheap but were technologically superior and of better quality to those of any foreign competitor. So, in conclusion, while workers' wages are, indeed, entered as a cost on the balance sheet, ruthless and unscrupulous bosses should not be allowed to treat them as just another commodity because, as well as being workers, they are also human beings and without the protection of the minimum wage it would be impossible for financially-exploited workers to live the dignified lives that all hard-working, law-abiding Americans Citizens deserve. Thank you. [1] http://www.indiastat.com...