I sort of agree. Sort of. Mostly with regard to the minimum wage. Numerous articles have been written by people who *support* helping the poor arguing that the minimum wage is a terrible way to achieve that end.

Here's the deal:

Here in the U.S. we have this notion of a minimum standard of living. Depending on where you're located, that implies a minimum cost of living in order to achieve that standard. The idea behind the minimum wage is that someone earning that wage would be able to maintain our pre-defined minimum standard of living in "most parts of the country", i.e. ignoring pathological locations like NYC, San Francisco, etc.

Problem is, lots of jobs require very little skills. There are folks in other countries who not only 1) don't have the same minimum standard of living requirement, but also 2) have a lower overall cost of living, who are ready and willing to perform those jobs. Since they're willing to accept what we would term an "unacceptably low" standard of living, and pay less to achieve that standard, they can work for less.

Voila: a huge incentive to outsource labor.

One solution is to come at the "minimum standard of living" problem another way and make it so that basic services are provided for free, but do away with the minimum wage. Workers can afford to "live" on a smaller wage since, presumably, they wouldn't have to pay for things like health care, their kids' tuition, etc. The cost of providing this artificially high standard of living for unskilled workers (relative to global standards) would then be shouldered by "all taxpayers" instead of by their individual employers.

If you restrict access to these nationalized services only to citizens and legal residents then voila- you've just put U.S. unskilled labor on an equal footing (cost-wise) with illegal labor while still affording legal workers the artificially high standard of living.

The down side to this approach, unfortunately, is that it mitigates the effect one's wage has on one's overall standard of living. The smaller that effect gets, the less motivation an unskilled person has to even work at all. If I can only earn $2/hr, then maybe that's just not worth my time and effort? Maybe I'm better off doing something illegal, mooching off a relative, or attempting to fraudulently access govt. assistance.

This isn't an issue in third-world countries since there is virtually no govt. assistance to speak of, so if you don't work then you don't eat. Unfortunately if you ~legitimately~ can't work then you still don't eat. That's the negative consequence of having no safety net.

Personally, I think we should move back to a more market-driven approach where employers are free to pay people what their skills are "worth". If we're going to attempt to guarantee a certain minimum standard of living, which I think is a good idea, then we should do so by providing certain services for free (e.g. health care) and passing regulations that set minimum quality standards for things like food, housing, etc. (Which we already have.)

One side note: assistance programs like section 8 housing are, interestingly, sort of like a subsidy for businesses. If someone only has to pay 50% of their housing costs, then they can afford to live somewhere and take a lower wage. Remove that housing subsidy and something has to give. Either the person's employer pays them a higher wage, or they move somewhere else with a lower cost of living (or higher wages). So, in a sense, the subsidy is ~enabling~ the business to pay that employee an artificially low wage, relative to what the market would otherwise demand.