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The minimum criterion for a fair wage is that if somebody works fulltime a week in a given job, he needs to be able to make a living by his income that funds his family, pays for raising and educating his children, and secure his life's evening when he has become old and does not work anymore. Else there would be no point in working fulltime.
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Please sir - put down the crack and step slowly away from the pipe.....
Skybird - how much does an education cost? Assuming your talking about JUST "primary" education - aka small children through high school - how much is that cost PER child? Using the "family of four" standard that has been bandied about - and using my own state's average cost per child (which was $8023.38 for FY2006) - and its fair to note that my state ranks fairly low in their per child spending - this just added $16k to the cost of that one employee... Now of course - to feed a family of 4 - which I have btw - our weekly grocery bill is between $150 - 200. We will use the $150 - multiply that by 52 weeks a year.... That is a grocery bill of $7,800 dollars a year just to feed everyone. Now we have a house payment and car payment - we will make it easy (as well as way too cheap just to prove the point) and include all the insurance and licensing costs with that - $1000 for the house and $300 for the car. So thats $15,600 for those. So right now we are at 16k + $7,800 + 15,600..... That equals $39,400.00
Now - Utilities (electricity, gas, oil, etc) - lets be gentle and make that $150 a month. Fuel for the vehicle - again using my own family experience that is about $200 bucks a month (I drive to work and back - thats it). So that adds another $4200 - and we haven't touched the costs of stuff like property taxes, or the cost of the health insurance, much less your "secure his life's evening when he has become old and does not work anymore." ideal.
So at this point - we have a total cost of JUST $43,600 not counting your very happy worker's contribution to his 401(k) - which lets say he decides to do a 3% contribution (which is also rather low) so thats an additional $1300.
Your ideal world will pay this employee more than $44,900 dollars a year (since I already noted there were other costs I haven't counted) - for putting boxes and cans on shelves, or running a cash register 40 hours a week.
But this STILL isn't the total cost - because it neglects payroll taxes ($2,783 for SS, $651 for medicare taxes, amounts for FUTA and SUTA will vary) , the company match to the 401(k) ($1300), health insurance costs paid by the employer, etc etc...
Just in taxes and the retirement push the cost of that employee well over $50,000 dollars a year. The health insurance is a substantial cost that will be specific to each employer - so I can't give numbers there.
$50,000 - Figure 260 paid work days a year (2 weeks vacation/sick time - total 250 days worked) - you have a person costing $200 a day - for 8 hours. That breaks down to a "realistic minimum fair" COST to be $25 dollars an hour for a stockboy putting cans on a shelf to that company.
Whats funny - is we didn't even count ALOT of additional costs for the family - so the real final numbers would be alot highter. So I challenge you Skybird - find ANY economic system - free market or fully socialized - that can sustain that level of burden long term without massive inflation (rising costs of good). There isn't one. Its not a perfect system we have - but your "utopian" one is doomed to catastrophic failure whereas a capitalist one is not.