You cannot gain prosperity by requiring people to pay employees more than they are worth to the company.
This is about as anti-liberterian a message as I have ever seen. It is a statist claiming to be a liberterian, or someone who is simply economically ignorant.
What would really happen is that those jobs that did not produce $12 an hour or more of value would be done away with, less value would be produced, and everyone would end up poorer.
The problem is due to unlimited immigration (legal and illegal), H1-B Visa’s and Outsourcing, there is essentially an unlimited supply of labor(cheap).
If we had a normal labor market the effective minimum wage would be much higher than $12/hr.
The cheap labor policies the US has adopted is causing massive problems for the majority of the citizens, all for the benefit of the few.
They are the exception, not the rule. If everybody gets $12 an hour, that would necessarily have to include the stoner with the nose jewel who spends at least as much time chatting up his/her friends as waiting on customers.
Employees are not paid what they are worth to a company. That is often impossible to determine anyway. What's a busboy worth to a restaurant? You can't operate one without them. But the wage is a function of supply and demand, and that market is distorted by millions of immigrants, both illegal and legal. And that market is only going to be more distorted in favor of employers if the Chamber of Commerce gets their way on "comprehensive immigration reform".