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

[Ryantology]

Employers owe their workers a living wage because those employees are the only reason they have one.

I can certainly think of cases where they won't have one if they pay all their workers, say, 12 bucks an hour. Some jobs aren't worth $12 an hour. There's a simple formula: if it costs more to employ someone than their labor generates for you, there's no reason to employ them, except charity.

Say I run a car wash. I pay most of my people 8.25 an hour. After payroll, I'm making about two dollars per person per hour. The minimum wage goes to 10.10 an hour. Now I'm making 15 cents per person per hour. I either have to increase my prices to maintain my income (about thirty dollars an hour if I employ 15 people on average). automate, or go out of business because I can't live on 2.25 an hour. The best case scenario for my employees is the one where I raise prices, provided my customers don't very reasonably start going to a cheaper automated car wash.

The most likely outcome is I automate or go out of business after variable amounts of struggle. Are the people I employed, mostly high school dropouts, made better off by the wage hike? They weren't paid well, but at least they were getting work experience and learning important job skills that most of us take for granted but many HS droputs lack, like showing up on time and putting in effort.

All this tells me is that we have an employer who lacks the innovation and ethic to actually work to make his business generate more profit, so he simply underpays his employees so that he can maintain his own lifestyle at their expense.

I don't buy this argument that an employer is entitled to a certain level of pay when the employees are not. You pay your expenses before you pay yourself. You don't get a pass buying equipment and supplies. You don't get a pass on your bills. Why do you get a pass on your labor? If you can't afford to pay your workers, you can't afford to pay yourself, or operate a business, and you should probably step down and let someone better take over.

Apparently it is not enough for employers to pay for the labor they get...they must pay for the people themselves. It doesn't matter if Joey's work is only worth 7 dollars an hour to the employer, Joey deserves 10 dollars an hour just for being a human being. Why should the difference between what Joey's work is worth and what Joey is worth fall solely on employers?

It is not enough for employers to pay for the equipment they get; they must also pay for the maintenance themselves.

An employer can simply mark up the value of their products to make up for a deficit in income, and in many cases can spread that markup so thinly that few even notice the difference (like, Papa Johns deciding to mark up their pizzas by 4 cents, or whatever, rather than cut hours and lay people off, when the ACA came into effect). Employees have little or no power to mark up the value of their work to make up for an income deficit.