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CPWill, as you apparently prefer, I’ll present an argumentum ad absurdum.
Though it seems you are still refusing to address the point raised - that harming the very poor in order to benefit the slightly less poor is a problem - alright
Although reducing the minimum’s purchasing power may promote creation of more jobs of lesser purchasing powers, pools of employees and unemployed workers will also be increased. Paradoxically, percentages of those unemployed are not reduced; but percentages and numbers of unemployed seekers of lower wage rate jobs may be particularly increased.
Assuming that by "the minimum" you meant "the minimum wage, what I understand you to be saying here is that reducing the minimum wage would create:
1. More jobs
2. More employees
3. More unemployed
While 1 and 2 are likely, so long as we do not increase unemployment payments to where they represent a higher rate than the previous minimum wage, 3 does not follow.
If a labor market lacks something similar to a legally enforced definite minimum rate or something that performs a similar function, that market may and likely will on numbers of occasions experience indefinite rates of the dreadfully poor purchasing powers.
Yes. That is the actual minimum wage, which is "zero, because you are unemployed". The more people we push into that category, the more we are reducing their purchasing power.
That’s the reason all major nations (regardless of their types of economies), have something similar to, or a quasi-government provision for, something performing the function of USA’s minimum wage rate laws.
Actually the reason we have minimum wage laws was to screw over non-whites:
...Leading supporters of legal minimum wages, certainly the most influential economists among them—Ely, Commons, Henry Rogers Seager, Sidney Webb, John B. Andrews, and others—were Progressive reformers, and many were AALL leaders. Progressive-Era marginalists—Alfred Marshall, John Bates Clark, Frank Taussig, Philip Wicksteed, and A. C. Pigou—generally opposed minimum wages (Leonard 2003b).
More surprising than Progressive support for legal minimum wages was the fact that Progressive economists, like their marginalist interlocutors, believed that binding minimum wages would result in job losses. What distinguished supporters of minimum wages from their marginalist opponents was how they regarded minimum-wage-induced job loss. Whereas the marginalists saw disemployment as the principal cost of binding minima, indeed as the reason to oppose minimum-wage legislation, minimum-wage advocates regarded minimum-wage-induced disemployment as a social benefit—a eugenic virtue of legal minimum wages. Sidney and Beatrice Webb ([1897] 1920, 785) state it plainly: “With regard to certain sections of the population [“unemployables”], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.”...
More surprising than Progressive support for legal minimum wages was the fact that Progressive economists, like their marginalist interlocutors, believed that binding minimum wages would result in job losses. What distinguished supporters of minimum wages from their marginalist opponents was how they regarded minimum-wage-induced job loss. Whereas the marginalists saw disemployment as the principal cost of binding minima, indeed as the reason to oppose minimum-wage legislation, minimum-wage advocates regarded minimum-wage-induced disemployment as a social benefit—a eugenic virtue of legal minimum wages. Sidney and Beatrice Webb ([1897] 1920, 785) state it plainly: “With regard to certain sections of the population [“unemployables”], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.”...
The original controversy over the minimum wage centered on what to do about that "unemployable class." By which they meant "black people" and (and, this has always been one of my favorite of the bizarre early Progressive phrasings) "the Mongrelized Asian Hordes". It was Syndey Webb (a major early proponent)'s belief, shared by many of the progressive economists affiliated with the American Economic Association, that establishing a minimum wage above the value of the "unemployables" worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class. "Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites," Webb observed, "the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners."
Sociologist E. A. Ross put it succinctly: "The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him." Since the "inferior races" were content to live closer to a filthy state of nature than the Nordic Man, the savages did not require a civilized wage. Hence if you raised minimum wages to a civilized level, employers wouldn't hire such miscreants, instead preferring "fitter" specimens, making the undesirables less likely to reproduce and, if necessary, easier targets for forced sterilization. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist and adviser to Woodrow Wilson, explained: "Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind."
We got the Davis-Bacon Act for the same reason. Darn ole blacks and immigrants were getting jobs when Decent White People' weren't. So, you raise the barrier for entry into the market, knowing that you'll price out many of the "undesirables".