I spent two weeks delivering for Uber Eats and made $4.40 per hour

Push it a little bit harder and you are going to argue minimum wage is a stalinian horror.

Nice refutation. Also, are you aware that minimum wages laws were originally designed to prevent low skilled blacks from competing on price with whites, right? Even to this day, minimum wage keeps minorities out of jobs. But if it makes you feel better at night that at least no one is payed $4 an hour, even if that means staying at home with $0 an hour.

For those downvoting, this is a historical fact:

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/carriesheffield/2014/04/29/on-t...

- http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0405-leonard-mini...

When you have no skills, you need to compete on price, that's just a fact of life. Preventing people from competing on price will keep them poor and unemployed. When this is done on purpose to racial minorities, it's called racism.

Your points are only meaningful if you think the goal of life is to have a job. When you realize others have different goals, then you'll be getting somewhere. Are you aware that penicillin was discovered by accident therefore it must not work... that's the argument you're making; it doesn't matter why something started if it turned out to be valuable in the end.

My point is that if living (and surviving) requires resources and gathering these resources requires working, then preventing people from working will only make their lives worse.

> Are you aware that penicillin was discovered by accident therefore it must not work

I've read that three times and it still doesn't make sense to me. Most scientific breakthrough happen while working on something else yeah. What does that have to do with the minimum wage topic?

And my point is resources are the goal, not work; there are other ways of obtaining a minimum living wage that don't require working yourself to the bone for less than a livable wage. We have safety nets for a reason.

It has everything to do with the minimum wage topic, I took your argument and applied it to something else to show how absurd it was. It doesn't matter why minimum wages were originally created just as it doesn't matter how penicillin was discovered; they are both useful nonetheless.

> It doesn't matter why minimum wages were originally created

It does actually matter because minimum wages were created to prevent minorities from finding jobs and compete with whites, they still have the same effect today. That's why it still matters to understand why they were created, so you can understand the consequences they still have today. As a member of a minority myself (son of a Syrian immigrant), I find these racist minimum wage laws outrageous but maybe you're a privileged white unaffected by these laws and therefor cannot understand how bad it sucks to be unemployed and that most people would rather have a low paying job than stay home and do nothing which makes you feel useless and depressed and discourages you from finding a job.

I'm really struggling to understand how minimum wage laws would automatically exclude immigrant workers from getting a minimum wage job.