Most arguments for minimum wage solutions are better served by UBI-style solutions tied to having a job somewhere. People show up to work to benefit society in some way deemed valuable by someone who put a much larger investment in play (maybe tie to some really small minimum wage like $2/hour just to make sure the business owner really does deem the labor beneficial), but the vast majority of the worker's income comes from wealth transfers from the wealthy (via UBI) instead of from the working classes (who are the vast majority of clientele at places like McDonald's).
Prevent a desperate race to the bottom? Ensure something approaching a minimum wage? Nobody cares, so long as they're getting a UBI check from the government.
I don't disagree with you and think that UBI and universal health care are better alternatives. However, there is a much easier path forward to getting higher minimum wages and we shouldn't stop making incremental changes just because there is a potentially better solution that we will probably never implement.
Of course, I can't prove that from scratch in a HN comment. What I can do is point out that in the science studying this, it is an uncontroversial fact.
I didn't substantiate that, which made it less convincing, but here is an Economics textbook saying the same thing: https://pressbooks.oer.hawaii.edu/principlesofmicroeconomics...
I know, you can think of an externality. Trust me, Economists can also think of externalities, far more than you or me. In general, they just add interesting nuance to the supply/demand model. They don't completely invalidate it.
But I can't easily demonstrate that, so I suspect I have not changed your mind.