You could, if you also had access to the same assets that the employers paying $15/hour do. Practically speaking, it's relatively hard to enter into a market a

You could, if you also had access to the same assets that the employers paying $15/hour do. Practically speaking, it's relatively hard to enter into a market and outcompete existing firms for labor without a significant amount of capital to offset the existing assets of the employers you're competing with. The other downside is that it can initially leave a business more vulnerable to a bad economy in the same way corporations buying back shares can make them more vulnerable. With that said, the solution is to slowly increase wages while also building a sufficient amount of capital to weather an economic downturn. And at the end of the day, anything that went into business expansion and/or profits could have gone at least partially to higher wages instead.