Why is it the employer's responsibility to provide a living wage?

[Ben Davis]

Overall, your responses appear to be 'conservative' or 'centre-right'. Is that an accurate assumption about your views on this topic?

Why would the employee work for someone who isn't 'paying them enough nuts' if they had a better alternative?

That's the crucial 'if'. There are many social & political factors that also corrupt the model of equity. I was simply focussing on the employer in order to answer the OP. The majority don't have a better alternative, they have to take the jobs that are available, based on their skill-set, in their locale. If employers aren't legislated to consider equitability, there are only ethical reasons why they may decide to pay a living wage and we all know that there's no ethical component to free-market capitalism!

Why would the employer pay more nuts to the employee than having the employee generates for the employer?

Personally, I think everyone involved in delivery of a business process should be paid equally but that'll derail this conversation. So the answer to this question is the same as my answer to the OP: because the employer is taking the time in which the employee might otherwise be able to provide for themselves. If the economics of your business model don't cover that investment, it's not viable.

That's a practice that will put you out of business if you do it with more than a small percentage of your employees.

Once again, if an employer can't do this with all your employees, they need to address their business model.

Scarcity is at the heart of current employment woes: we are awash in a sea of less-skilled labor, and the tasks that can only be done by a minimually-educated human are shrinking.

Indeed. The possible answers to this situation don't necessarily sit with employer, mainly with education and 'standard of living' practices that are the realm of local politics but that doesn't mean that employers are totally divorced from that. Many employers have increased their business value by (for example) setting up broad education policies, upskilling staff, aligning roles to people based on their characteristics (rather than their experience) and restructuring resources rather than exploiting redundancy when automating. Of course, smaller businesses may not have access to the necessary capital and would therefore have a greater dependency on the political landscape but many of these possibilities are still practical.

Sooner or later we will have to subsidize people who fit this description for being alive, because those kinds of jobs are going away and they're never coming back.

Sooner or later, the whole world is going to have to move away from the current, unsustainable models of capitalism but once again, that's a derail. I'd suggest that if governments start to take their social responsibilities more seriously (e.g. education, welfare systems, healthcare...), the problems will start to take care of themselves: we'll have more capable, enabled, resourceful people who won't have to rely on subsidisation.

And those aren't the only jobs going away. It's time to start thinking about minimum income.

The only thing to think about minimum income is why it isn't being provided and find ways to make it happen. Governments will need to help small & medium enterprises through that process and back up any changes with equal focus on dealing with the socio-political causes (money where their mouth is!) but for large corporations, it's easily done and should be happening now; there's no excuse for them.