 Hey, I have a project that I don't have time to complete, but it should only take a few more hours of work. Would you mind if I paid you 50 bucks to take care of it? Sure, I got nothing better to do. What? 50 dollars? You can't live off that! How can you pay this person anything less than a full-time livable salary when they're working for you? Well, because not every service we might exchange money for requires a full-time, salaried employee. For example, I have a client who's paying me $2,000 to create a short animation. I've spent the last month putting it together, but now I'm finding I won't have the time to complete the last five hours of work. There's two possible scenarios. I can find someone who's willing to work for me, let them earn a bit of money assisting me and deliver a product to a happy client, or you can shut me down for not paying a quote living wage, unquote, in which case my project won't be completed. I'll miss out on my hard-earned money, my reputation will be damaged, the person willing to help me will miss out on 50 bucks, and the client won't get their product. Seems pretty unfair that you'd be able to make everyone's life so much more difficult. But that's just greedy! You only feel that way because you're getting a living wage. I'm okay with it. Plus, I need some rent money. Quiet, you! Actually, virtually none of my clients pay me enough to live off of. Most of them can only afford to hire me for a few months out of the year for a fraction of the average salary. But fortunately, I've been able to accumulate enough clients so that my combined earnings are enough to support myself. But if you told each of my clients that because they weren't paying me a full-time salary, they shouldn't be able to hire me, I would never have been able to build my career or pay any of the private contractors I work with. That would be unfair to everyone. Huh. Well, I guess that makes sense for part-time work, but... A lot of businesses pay low wages to workers who are with them full-time! Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most minimum wage workers are young people working part-time. Only 1% of full-time hourly wage earners make minimum wage or less, compared to 6% of part-time hourly wage earners. And of all hourly workers earning minimum wage or less, half are under the age of 25, despite the fact that people 25 and under only make up about 20% of hourly wage earners. These are often high school and college students working jobs in the summer and during the school year. People with other sources of income just looking for extra cash, and a lot of people who have not yet developed the skills or experience needed to command a higher salary. But most people don't remain in low-paid positions their entire lives. As they get older and gain more education and more experience, they move up in income as well. Look, whether it's myself, Seamus, or someone working at a fast-food joint, it's good that you want people to earn a fair wage. But what's most important is for us to be able to have a job in the first place. The way to ensure that is to lower as many of the barriers to getting a job or becoming an entrepreneur as we possibly can. Not to put more in the way. Exactly! Are we really going to cut the people who are just starting out or people like me with multiple employers out of the workforce? Yes! Police! Can't always count on people to be reasonable. Hey, at least you've got walls. Hey folks, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video and want to view more similar educational content, please check out fee.org. Thank you.