Point taken around the guarantee of thriving. However: > it doesn't even guarantee everyone a job > everyone who has a job has a very real opportunity to make

Point taken around the guarantee of thriving. However: > it doesn't even guarantee everyone a job > everyone who has a job has a very real opportunity to make themselves a comfortable life I want to go further on this point. There have been plenty of empirical studies evidencing the Econ 101 maxim that a government-imposed price floor causes a surplus, and conversely a price ceiling a shortage. A minimum wage is a price floor on labor that causes a surplus of it, meaning unemployed people. Rent control is a price ceiling on housing that causes a shortage of it, meaning people on waiting lists for affordable housing. So on and so forth; in every case it's great for the people in the system, and terrible for the people outside. There's a second-order effect to this, especially deleterious in the case of the minimum wage, which is that the young and the marginalized take the brunt of the impact of missing out on the upskilling, networking, and building experience that comes from having a job, even if it pays very poorly, maybe not even for the necessities of life, let alone the enjoyment of it. So over time, the difference between the ones who were lucky enough to get in and the ones who were unemployed because the economic value of their labor was less than the minimum wage broadens, and you run the risk of the latter group becoming a permanently unemployable underclass. In other words: even a shitty, poorly-paying job is likely to be better for the employee over the long run than no job at all; and because of this, a high minimum wage is likely to result in an unintentional increase in the disparity of outcomes between the haves and the have-nots.