Paying more could work for certain kinds of jobs, but others are simply not productive enough to justify paying more. I recently went to a country without a mi

Paying more could work for certain kinds of jobs, but others are simply not productive enough to justify paying more. I recently went to a country without a minimum wage and it was amazing what they were paying people (presumably very little) to do, such as sell napkins and straws in a market. Without a regulatory requirement to do so, it's simply impossible for an employer to extract a U.S. minimum wage's worth of productivity doing that kind of activity. That's not to say that every low paying job is like this. We in the U.S. have gotten used to certain blue collar jobs paying very little because of massive numbers of new immigrants, legal and illegal. Now that the spigot is being turned off, there's a labor shortage at the low end. Maybe, e.g., food and construction ought to cost more to compensate, which will certainly change the type of offerings of each, but we might get more efficient usage as a result.