Consequence of $20 minimum wage for fast food workers?

[Bomb#20]

The economic rationalist philosophy is a choice made by our society, not a law of nature.

No it isn't. The philosophy our society chose was Christianity; despite the best efforts of a variety of subcultures, when it lost interest in imposing that one on itself it never got around to choosing another philosophy to replace it. Consequently our society currently leaves choices of philosophies to individuals, just by default.

It's certainly the best way to drive efficiency and increase value for shareholders; But I don't recall being invited to the meeting where humanity agreed that those should be our only, or even our major*, goals.

Don't feel excluded. Those aren't our only or even major goals. Our economy isn't optimizing for those. Increasing efficiency and shareholder value is a side-effect of allowing everyone to pursue his and her own goals. It's sort of like the way all of us objects act as if we were seeking out how to best optimize momentum times distance, even though that's just a side-effect of our individually accelerating in proportion to outside forces, and exerting forces equal and opposite to those exerted on us.

We could accept lower efficiency or lower value for shareholders, in pursuit of lower poverty, or full employment, or shorter working hours, or a smaller workforce, for example.

And in fact you do. There actually was a series of meetings held in which Australia's appointed decision makers decided society would accept lower efficiency and lower value for shareholders, in pursuit of higher wages for a subset of the workforce, to be achieved by pursuing a smaller workforce, by excluding some workers from the job market. First, they decided to exclude men who lacked the skills to increase any employer's income enough to support a wife and three children in "frugal comfort" from the workforce. Then they decided to exclude women who lacked the skills to increase any employer's income enough to support themselves from the workforce, but to allow them to work even if they couldn't also support another woman and three kids on the proceeds. And then, apparently realizing they had thereby incentivized employers to hire women, they decided to also exclude women who lacked the skills to increase any employer's income enough to support a wife and three children, whenever the jobs those women wanted to compete for were jobs men needed. The judges made a very deliberate choice to pursue a smaller workforce. The women who were deliberately priced out of the job market don't recall being invited to that final meeting.