Minimum wage follies

Business owner Warren Meyer:

Every year, my company hires hundreds of minimum wage workers for seasonal campground management jobs.  Most of these workers are retired and in their sixties and seventies...Every year we receive over 10,000 job applications for our minimum wage positions (even back when the minimum wage was only $5.15).  Many are perfectly happy with the low wage (some even try to bargain me down, to try to avoid interference with Social Security and disability limits).  Unfortunately, when the minimum wage goes up, I often find myself cutting staff.  We have automated certain positions away, walked away from contracts that were not economic at higher wage rates, and had to outsource certain functions to outsiders.  

And yet minimum wage legislation is invariably promoted as a means of helping workers. On the one hand you have the rhetoric, and on the other is the reality.