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good to accept whatever your employer wants to pay you if the consensus is that people are supposed to want to work for little to nothing in this country (and here I thought theft was immoral!), but it won't get you very far if your wages are losing buying power because of price increases that had nothing to do with your paycheck. This would be why workers start seriously agitating for minimum wage increases about every ten years or so. It's no great mystery.

Now let's talk about hiring decisions. I don't own a business and maybe I'm missing something here, but I would think pay rate would be one of the lesser factors determining my hiring decision if I were in a position to hire employees. Why? Because I already know, even before I read an application or a resum, what I'm going to pay a new employee. I might allow for wiggle room to pay someone a little more if they have the experience to warrant it, but I've factored that in as well. If I had already decided I was going to pay a new person five dollars an hour and they came to the interview demanding twenty, that person would simply not get a job. More important to me would be the candidate's attitude, experience, and level of camaraderie with my other employees, in that order. But the bottom line is that a good business owner is not going to take on more expense than he or she can handle, and should have gone into running the business understanding that there were costs involved.

And frankly, it's not the end of the world if a business can't hire large numbers of people. I feel that many individuals who would otherwise have the capacity to run their own businesses are stymied by a lack of education about how to start and run their own businesses, and their prospects are dimmed from the outset by the fact there is a hugely bloated competitor out in the suburbs hiring people at minimum wage and taking up all the work. There will always be people, however, who aren't cut out for entrepreneurship, and they need jobs because we have a money-based economy. Therefore, keeping wages high enough to meet the costs of living helps those who can't or won't go into business for themselves, but keeps companies small enough that there is enough work for everybody who wants to be their own boss.

For example, ABC Grocery has an operating budget of $10 million, allowing them to hire 500 employees at minimum wage. (I am completely making up these numbers off the cuff, so bear with me.) Unfortunately, being able to hire those

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