Teenagers don't need to support a family. Without much in the way of valuable skills, they may still want a job for spending money and experience. Your propos

Teenagers don't need to support a family. Without much in the way of valuable skills, they may still want a job for spending money and experience. Your proposed minimum wage would make this illegal. College students don't need to support a family. They may want to take a low-paying internship to build experience in their chosen field. Your proposed minimum wage could make this illegal. Mothers of school-age children who are supported by their husbands don't need to support a family. They may wish to do part-time, low-skilled work to build expertise in preparation for a future career after their children leave. Your proposed minimum wage would make this illegal. Retirees with pensions don't need to support a family. They may wish to do work, possibly even very low-skilled work, as a way to combine a hobby with a sense of being useful. Or possibly as a launching-pad for more of a "fun" career than the "serious" career they've already finished. Your proposed minimum wage could make this illegal. Low-skilled immigrants do sometimes need to support a family. When one member can't do it alone, sometimes mom, dad, and the oldest kid hold down four full-time jobs between them to make it work. The arrangement isn't permanent; it lasts until they can do better. But in the mean time, they can support themselves. Your proposed minimum wage law could make it impossible for them to support themselves this way, and force them to rely on charity. This in turn could make it impossible for them to immigrate at all. Some people have very low expenses. A paid-off house, a renter, a garden in the backyard, and a low-paying job can be enough to make ends meet. Setting the minimum wage at a level such that someone with a mortgage and unproductive hobbies can raise a family would force this person, who could otherwise support themselves, to rely on charity. I could go on. My point is that the world is a complicated place. Not every worker is a single-head-of-household-with-three-children sort of worker. Not every job is a permanent career. They can be educational, transitional, temporary. They can be held by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. Provide assistance to the poor if you like, but don't make work illegal. Don't ever do that. There's a huge potential to hurt a lot of people, just because they're living lifestyles you aren't familiar with.