Thanks for the follow-up. Here's the heart of the matter, right here. You or I, as human beings, are uncomfortable, and wish to improve the wealth of our society. Good on us, but we're a tiny minority. It will be a faceless corporation which will in reality be supplying the majority of those jobs, and that entity will have a very different idea of what is "best for the business", and is (I assert) much less likely to give two shits about raising the community out of poverty. That's why a minimum wage makes sense - because in general it is NOT ethical to pay people as little as you can get away; and corporations have no ethics that are not imposed on them (not being human like you and I).I would be extremely uncomfortable in this situation.
Out of a sample size of 2, then, 100% of us care about the welfare of others and would not selfishly improve our condition if it meant harming others. This is not much data, so I did an experiment. I looked through my phone's contact list and counted all the people I think I know well enough to decide if they are also like us. By the time I got to about 50, there were none of whom I was certain they would be willing to hurt others to get ahead, and only a few of whom I was not sure. The majority of the people I know seem decent and I believe they are also very uncomfortable seeing other humans suffer. Is your experience different? Do you know a lot of people who, in this scenario, would be comfortable paying a "pittance" to have people mow their lawn and wash their car, not caring that they are trying to "keep their family alive"?You or I, as human beings, are uncomfortable, and wish to improve the wealth of our society. Good on us, but we're a tiny minority.
Exactly as b_b says, I meant "tiny minority" in the sense of the jobs we might provide. Sorry for being unclear, and thanks also for showing my mistake in framing the original postulate as a wealthy person. It's a business that I should have posited, since as you rightly point out, people in general are extremely moral in most circumstance.
I read briandmyers' comment to mean that a corporation, being incorporeal, lacks a sense of justice, and that regulations, in certain cases, can guide the behavior of a corporation to act more like individuals might act toward one another. This isn't to say that this goal is always, or even often, accomplished, but merely that it may be an aim. I, for example, used to work for Dow Chemical. My boss at Dow was an Indian fellow who worked for Union Carbide before Dow purchased them. Both of us were (are) good, caring people. Both companies are soulless and evil, having given the world such gifts are Agent Orange and the Bhopal disaster. The aggregate behavior of the companies did not reflect the morality of the individuals within. Although FWIW my boss thought Union Carbide was an excellent firm, which is a great lesson in relativism, given that the man was dirt poor as a child, and UC helped him get out of poverty, get a PhD in chemistry from University of Michigan, and live a generally good, upper middle class life in America. Bhopal didn't even enter into the calculus of how he felt about them. I can't see it that way, because I don't know what it's like to grow up picking garbage to stay alive.