Min wage was not intended to provide a living wage. It was about providing a wage floor to give some protection to workers.
The zombie bodies of Eugene V. Debs, Samuel Gompers, and William Jennings Bryan just walked by and went "BLARUGHGHHGH" which is zombie for "What are you talking about?!" If it isn't a "living wage", what the heck is it?! The male used to be the only wage earner... so if that wage isn't enough for a family to live on... what in the heck is the point?!
The point is the same as the point of picket lines -- if it comes to it, the same as the point of beating up scabs. The point is to improve the standard of living of a subset of the workers, by increasing the total wages negotiated from the employers, by not leaving money on the table, by moving across the supply-and-demand chart from the competitive price/quantity point to the monopoly price/quantity point, by reducing the amount of labor that's hired, by limiting the supply of labor, by convincing some of the workers to agree not to compete for a share of those wages with the workers who will be getting an increased wage, because competing would weaken the negotiation against the employers. The point is to get the worst-off workers to sacrifice their own standard of living for the sake of the standard of living of better-off workers. The point has nothing to do with "living wage" philosophy and everything to do with game theory.
My problem is that the low wages... the taxpayers are subsidizing the food, housing, and health care of those low wage workers. IE, WE (notice, bold, italic, and underlined!) are subsidizing the substandard wages of the corporations.
So your theory is that when somebody has so little to trade that he needs to trade all he has to trade away in a year in exchange for less than what he needs in a year, then anybody who benevolently saves his life and his wellbeing by making up the shortfall for him is therefore automatically subsidizing, not him, but rather the person who trades him part of his needs for all he can offer in exchange? And this metaphysical transference of the target of subsidy offends your moral sensibilities to the point where you feel the government should ban him and his trading partner from making the trade at all unless the other party volunteers to accept however little he has to trade in a year in exchange for a full year of his needs?
Because if that's your metaphysical theory and that's your moral theory, then your metaphysical theory would imply when a guy can't work and has nothing to trade in a year except the dividends from the stock he inherited, and it's only enough to let him buy food for four months, that the food stamps the rest of us give him so he can eat for another eight months are a subsidy not to him but
to his grocer. And your moral theory would imply that it's immoral for WE to have to subsidize the substandard food deliveries of the grocer, so therefore WE should instead compel the grocer to choose between feeding the guy for eight months at her own expense or else not selling him any food at all.
Do you in fact think grocers should be expected to feed the poor all they need regardless of how little they're paid, and should not get reimbursed for that food by a food stamp program?
If you want to argue that that's different, and society pushing the whole bill for our collective charity onto one designated individual is virtuous when she's an employer but not when she's a grocer, feel free to post whichever special-pleading fallacy you think justifies making that distinction.
(Note for those reading casually: this is not an argument against a minimum wage -- a minimum wage can be defended independently on utilitarian grounds, as bilby did in post #48. This is an argument against the religious faith that is "living wage" ideology.)
