Do a search online for raising the minimum wage and you will see a number of articles and essays detailing why it should not be done . No matter how detailed or long these articles are, they all have one central argument, which is: If we raise the wages of the lower classes, the providers of goods and services will have to raise their prices, which will cause everything to rise. To that I say bullshit. It is crazy to think that a company like Wal-Mart, whose CEO earns an annual salary of $20.7 million, would have to raise its prices as well as its employees' salaries in order to make a substantial profit margin. That's simply not true, especially when you consider that the average Wal-Mart employee only makes almost $9.00 an hour, and it's not just Wal -Mart, but other consumer-focused companies, such as Target and TJ MAXX. The CEOs of these companies earn ridiculously high salaries without even paying their employees enough to live on. The question is why. The reason is simple. It's greed. The more a CEO earns, the more he wants to earn. The economy is no longer about providing a good or service to the population as a whole, but about accumulating as much wealth as possible, and you are stupid if you think you have the same opportunities to acquire wealth as the CEOs of Wal-Mart and Target. . The truth is that the deck is stacked against you, and the situation keeps getting worse as the world shifts in its orbit. The economy now relies largely on trade and the sale of goods, and the worker has become a cheap, disposable commodity, for megalomaniacs sitting atop mountains of money, throwing away the crumbs as they please. Workers’ collective bargaining rights are disappearing at an alarming rate. Middle of paper data... a sort of nanny state to make everyone dependent on the socialist government. The hard truth is that the majority of people benefiting from these programs work full time and are not the only ones doing so in their household. To reiterate this point, a higher wage means fewer people on welfare, and that frees up tax dollars that could be used for other purposes, or that could go back into the pockets of the American worker. Many would read this and call me a socialist, and if offering an argument for workers' rights makes me a socialist, so be it. Blogs, articles, and essays, some written by economists with advanced degrees, people academically more competent than I, will continue to deride rising wages for lower-class workers or the need to implement a regulation. I'm just saying they're wrong, and this essay proves it.