It's a targeted redistribution that only hits those employers with a minimum wage workforce.

Right - as opposed to employers with a living wage workforce, which is not the same. Most of the minimum wage employers - fast food, retail - will simply ditch jobs if their margins are too low. McDonald's has had automated order and checkout in the works for 20 years now - they aren't pulling the trigger because they don't have to. Best Buy has vending machines at lots of airports. Grocery stores are most likely to invest in self-check in regions that are most heavily unionized. "Minimum wage workforce" is code for teens, illegals and the indigent.

It's a tax that doesn't fall on high-skill labor employers (place-making).

A wage is not a tax. A tax is not a wage. Employ someone on an 01 visa and you will pay a tax to the government for hiring them instead of an able-bodied American Pay someone $4 over what you're required to pay them and the government doesn't benefit at all - the same money comes to them from you or them.

I agree that it is partially about lifestyle protectionism, but that's not exclusive to redistribution.

But you haven't made the argument.

A Federal minimum wage of $10.10 does approach or equate to a living wage in a number of places...

Quite. Red states, mostly. Goes a long way towards explaining approval ratings, considering.

Problem is, it isn't a living wage everywhere. That's why Republicans generally argue against it - it isn't enough to do anybody any good, but it's too much to expect those poor, downtrodden "small business owners" to shoulder.

IMO the minimum wage is in part an attempt to force other companies to be as just as Costco since it doesn't seem that the workforce is rational or mobile or organized enough to make it untenable for employers to do so.

IMO the minimum wage is like Obamacare - a not-quite-good-enough solution to a problem that desperately needs something better.

Predatory corporations can't employ kids anymore and they have to provide safety equipment.

Yeah, but that shit dates back to Upton Sinclair. What have they done for us lately?

But what of a living wage? Is that what an employer should provide?

There are plenty of employers that do. In'n'Out provides a living wage. Dick's Drive In in Seattle. Costco. There are others. These are generally privately-held corporations that aren't beholden to stockholders, who recognize that employee retention is often just as valuable as overhead reduction to long-term profit.

Know what would be interesting? If the Amazon warehouses unionized. I'll betcha Amazon would fold within a year of it. Because by your reasoning ("minimum wage is a tax"), zero-margin Internet goods are a penalty.