the purpose of a minimum wage is to provide a rock bottom in the marketplace to prevent pseudo slavery.  It's not meant to be a panacea.  One of the problems that i see with this conversation in general is that some want to reference an economic study about some conglomerate that can spread costs over tens of millions of customers will fair.  When you use the force of government to impose a mandate on society then it doesn't just affect the walmart's of the world.  Right now we are destroying more businesses than we are creating and i believe that is the first time in our history.  Arbitrarily doubling the minimum wage does nothing to help the guy or gal who just cashed in their 401k because they had a dream and right now they can only afford 4 or five employees and they themselves work 100 hours a week to pick up the slack.  Sometimes small business owners can go weeks months or in some cases years without ever actually taking home a paycheck especially when trying to get a small business off the ground.  

 

With all the bank regulations designed to stop the extreme practices of mega mega banks we have lost about 40% of all community banks in this country.  That's where a lot of small business people went to get start up capital.  now in an environment where customers are becoming more scarce and depreciation of price is starting to creep into the market is not the time to unilaterally increase the cost of start up labor on small business owners when the odds are already stacked against them.  

 

In a sane world, if a business owner wanted to pay the guy behind the counter $15 an hour then that's their business.  Let the results over time act as a case for or against that kind of policy.  Imposing one size fits all bumper sticker slogans may make you feel good in the short term, but in reality it just means that most people who don't have the ability to affect productivity or customer interaction enough to justify that wage will loose their jobs.

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