Hey hubski, is there an arbitration feature?

I don't feel I have been obtuse. I will admit to being stubborn and a smartass.

I didn't say so until later, but my interest is in the ethics of paying employees low wages. This is relevant to policy issues like minimum wage, as well as the much-discussed "sweatshop" phenomenon.

My original question, about hiring someone at $25,000, was "What do you do?" NotPhil gave a utilitarian answer based on his belief that anyone who would accept this rate would not be a reliable long-term employee, so hiring them would be bad for business (and, eventually, society). That's fine, but it didn't get to my interest in the ethics of the situation. I thought that not every candidate would be unreliable just because of their willingness to work for that salary. I provided four examples of such people.

NotPhil gave another utilitarian answer about how hiring three of these people would expose the employer to legal risk. That's fine too, and was an interesting point. Still hoping to explore the ethical angle, I asked about the fourth example, the one which was not subject to the practical issue of legal liability. I don't see any response to this case. NotPhil has repeated his belief that you should not hire at a low salary because "your employee will either fail or require public assistance which you will pay for anyhow with increased taxes." That can happen ... but what if it doesn't? Millions of people work at or below the salary we are talking about. They are not all failing or on welfare.

I felt the thought experiment would be more interesting, but here's the real question: "Is it inherently unethical to pay an employee a low salary?"

What perplexes me most is the idea that hiring someone at a low salary is bad because it will cause bad outcomes, presumably because the employee is not as well-off as he would be with a higher salary. But in my view, the result of not hiring them at a low rate is that they will be worse off than they would be making the low salary, so the bad outcomes are even more likely.