> Try it like this. Federal minimum wage comes out to around $15,000/year. This is in the same ballpark as college tuition -- which is generally regarded as costing a lot of money. If you go to an institution where you're a novice and it takes half your hours to learn the trade and the other half is productive work for the employer, you would expect these two to net to approximately zero, right? So why is it at all unexpected that it would frequently net to a number which is slightly positive but less than minimum wage?

Again, you are missing the point. Either that job is an internship (non-permanent and I already addressed it) or you will quickly become a fully productive worker (this is literally just training/ramp up and is not a significant cost to employers). These are not the jobs/pay structures minimum wage laws are affecting nor are people discussing, this is just a straw man.

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> How would you expect to you hear of some when they're prohibited by law?

Legality does not define what concepts exist in the world, so let's hear them! You have yet to even mention a single example.

Companies can and do regularly lobby for laws. They don't appear to be using this line of reasoning because if large minimum wage employers like McDonalds or Walmart tried this they would be laughed at even in political spheres.

> Probably the large majority of them

I suspect we're gonna have to agree to disagree here on what's going to happen without a minimum wage.

> because otherwise why would anybody take those jobs?

People take badly paying jobs because if you're faced with bad and really bad, you'll take bad. Companies are free to exploit this without minimum wage laws in place. This type of exploitation only works in a buyers (if we put employees here as "buyers" of jobs) market, and immediately pushes wages significantly lower in a sellers market, which we have seen for quite a good deal of the past few decades. We can't have economics that are only moral when things are going well.

> Taking those options away makes peoples lives worse, not better.

The flaw here is that you're looking at only one side of the equation. You are improving the lives of every job that has a raised salary as a result. Now the calculus on how many jobs that removes vs raises, what kind, and where is a valid debate, but again, this tradeoff is a moral one. Economists are doing studies to get numbers so that then we as a society can make the moral decision on the tradeoff. That moral question however is not one that economists can answer. They can only study and communicate the effects.

> And it's why most of the jobs that would pay less than minimum wage are ones that offer the workers something else in its place -- education, more flexible hours, a shorter commute etc. Taking those options away makes peoples lives worse, not better.

Big citation needed here.

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I'm not looking to get into the weeds here frankly, that is not the point of my original comment. There are many studies on both sides of the minimum wage debate, and that's just going to turn into a linking war between people who are not economists and are also not likely to change their minds on the internet. I have my beliefs based on the data I have seen but again, this doesn't seem fruitful to go down this route.

The point I am making here which none of your points address is that minimum wage legislation is very much tied to moral considerations, and economics aids in giving numbers for those. At the end of the day, the viability rests on morality as interpreted based on data produced by economics.