From Henry Hazlitts 1946 classic "Economics in One Lesson":
You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.
If your competitors can hire cheap people for working there, you will never be able to justify hiring more expensively. But if they can not hire that cheaply, you will be able to spend more too.
You will also never be able to justify hiring more expensively if you can instead use a cheap/free machine, which is of course where we're heading, since people refuse to acknowledge the truth in OP's quote.
Price is the common agreement between those who have a thing, and those who want it, net of all other circumstances, to mediate an exchange.
If price exceeds costs, then that trade is equitable and sustainable.
Where a wage is offered that does not meet the provisioning costs of a good or service, that good or service cannot be sustainably provisioned, and the exchange is only sustained by the net transfer of wealth from the seller to the buyer. Such exchanges frequently occur, under a "backwards S-shaped" supply curve.
Here, the short term costs of a good or service may be met, but its long-term costs are not. A paradox is that as wages are pushed down, working hours increase, because the only way a worker can afford sufficient food is to increase the hours worked.
Similar dynamics are seen in oil, e.g., the $0.02/bbl price of oil low hit during the East Texas Oil Boom ~1929 - 1931. (Daniel Yergin, The Prize, chapter 13, generally).
As Adam Smith observed:
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.
Sweat shops, while convenient to those in higher economic positions, are not economically sustainable.
But, yes, let's deregulate everything so a few property owners can amass all the wealth to themselves. Great idea. Never been done before. Let's give it a shot.
The concept of minimum wage is beneficial to the big players as well, because the small players will eventually have neither the money to pay people more than they're worth nor the upfront capital to develop the machines to replace them.
You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.