Equally, if employee Y is producing the same quality of work as employee X but trying to charge more money, does employee Y not deserve to be out-competed by employee X?
Employment is a two-sided market too.
Nobody would advocate for a minimum price for a packet of crisps just to save the poor crisp companies from earning too little per packet. It is obvious that if crisps were too expensive, people would stop buying them. The same applies for workers.
Minimum wage is just saying "if you can't produce at least $X of value per hour, you're not allowed to work at all". That's not fair.
Price floors on many products are considered here in order to maintain certain industries. Not to mention import taxes which also set price floors in a way.
That's an oversimplification, since it ignores what is paid to people who produce more than $X of value per hour.
Minimum wage says something closer to, "If you can produce at least $X+Y value per hour, you will be paid at least $X", where X is the minimum wage, and Y is the level of profit that a company needs to operate.
Assuming no upward pressure on X, a company will prefer to maximise Y and minimise X. Minimum wage laws are one way to apply upward pressure. Competition over constrained supply is another, but only applies if there actually is a supply constraint.
But in a modern democracy, labour has a different sort of power and I cannot think of a moral principle that says that labour should not distort the market using its power at the ballot box.
If a pro-unregulated market candidate can't win more votes than the guy who wants to support minimum wages, he doesn't deserve to win. And he doesn't deserve to enact his policies.
So an ancap can argue his point but if he can't win in the marketplace of ideas, then he doesn't win. Because that market is truly free.
That's fair.
It's more efficient and humane than basically telling them they're worthless and they should just stay unemployed.
Employees don't get paid the full value they generate, so that's not a reasonable way to interpret minimum wage.
Welfare state as in? Having social benefits and minimum wage is not mutually exclusive.
Furthermore according to Wikipedia [1] the minimum wage in Germany is 8.84 EUR. You might say, "that's Wikipedia, that's no reliable source!" No sweat, go click the link first. For this specific information (minimum wage in Germany) they provide links to an English AND German source.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...
Non sequitur.
Also, inaccurate. You can't _legally_ work if you can't produce $X of value per hour. Of course you can work; it'd just be illegal. The oldest profession in world is, after all, prostitution. And there's demand for that.
Also, if you can find applicable work or not is not entirely up to the potential worker. That's supply AND demand.
Which means you end up working illegally (in a what I'd argue is an uncivilized society) or you end up with social benefits (in a what I'd argue is a civilized society).
Which means, following your logic: "if you cannot be profitable while paying your employees minimum wage a $X/hour, don't have that job available."
In other words, if you cannot pay your workers a fair fee while delivering food, don't deliver food at all. But I guarantee you its profitable. Food has been delivered for many decennia. I remember as a child in the '80s we had a minimum order fee, a delivery fee, and a radius where orders were delivered to. Some companies still do that.
Of course, we end up competing with migrant workers from less free areas in the world. But that does not mean we need to lower our standards to those of where those people come from.
As a final note, its important that minimum wage laws exist because they're roughly the minimum means to an end in society. The minimum required to have food, a roof, insurance, and basics like an Internet connection.
They get fired as soon as statistics show they don't meet their targets. We already have tons of those jobs in existence and the rise of technology only oversimplified this further. Case in point: a call center. Say the goal is you need to deal with X customers in an hour. That doesn't mean their problems are solved. And even if the problem is (seemingly) solved that doesn't mean their problems are solved in the best way possible. And yet, this is the basis of how call centers operate these days.
What happens when people get fired? Well, in some countries you get social benefits and in some you don't but there's no country where those benefits are going to pay your bills AND allow you to enjoy any form of luxury. So what happens either way? They look for a new job. Preferably legal job, but if they can't, they resort to shady businesses. Grey areas. You know, like Uber*?
If someone can't support themselves, then I believe that the wider community should help.
The two groups of people which I have in mind are: 1) those who can't produce enough value to support themselves, and 2) those who can produce enough value to support themselves, but who are not paid a large enough fraction of that value to actually do so.
My understanding is that X is set high enough so that people in group 2 will get a large enough share to support themselves (so it moves people from the poverty-stricken group to the somewhat-poor group at the cost of company profits) while still being low enough such that anyone who produces less would fall into group 1 anyway, and would therefore need other more direct help, independent of any minimum wage laws.
Is your position that for any X, some people will be forced into group 1 who would otherwise consider themselves self-sufficient, and that the cost to them outweighs the benefit to those in group 2?