>If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to ex

>If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to expose yourself to experience by doing internships. If you don't have anything better to be doing, then it's a win-win situation for you and the person you're doing internship. That only works in an absolutely frictionless labor market. Meanwhile, in the real world, there are many sources of friction - location being the most prominent. If you have valuable skills, in say, graphic design and the one print shop in your town shuts down, then it doesn't matter how good you are as a designer - you're not going to get a job. Through the '90s, it didn't matter how good a machinist you were - if you lived in the Detroit area, your employment prospects were poor, just because of the glut caused by hemorrhaging auto industry. >There is an argument in favour of minimum wage, and it's this: some people are too incompetent to be capable of standing up for themselves, and these people would be easy to take advantage of for malicious bosses, of which there are no shortage. The minimum wage is a blunt force mechanism that aims (and fails) to protect this set of people. The reason it fails is that in protecting low-wage employed people, it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unemployed. Nice job with that straw-man. Unfortunately, the argument you cite bears no resemblance to the actual reason we have a minimum wage. The reason we have a minimum wage is that historically, its the lack of a minimum wage that has created an underclass of people in poverty that don't have the resources to increase their station in life. All throughout the 1800s and early 1900s the US tried to be your minimum-wage free utopia. The results were horrific. We had a permanent underclass of (usually immigrant) tenants living in squalid conditions. If you want to regress to 1890s-era working conditions, then yes, by all means repeal the minimum wage. Lacking a minimum wage also hurts the economy. Without a minimum wage, the number of consumers for any good beyond basic food, clothing and shelter products would be drastically cut. History has shown that without outside incentives, employers will pay only the minimum needed to keep their workers alive (and sometimes not even that). A minimum wage ensures that there is a bottom in the race to the bottom for wages. >The minimum wage system is a mechanism designed by the elite to allow that elite to paper over things and sleep at night pretending they're doing the right thing. It hurts the people it claims to protect. If that's the case, then why do the elites always protest vociferously every time the minimum wage is raised? There are massive lobbying efforts by big business every time the minimum wage issue comes up for debate, despite the fact that there is no economic evidence whatsoever that the presence of a $7.25 minimum wage has had a measurable impact on employment.