If you really haven't ever heard a good argument in favor of an enormously popular economic policy that's been endorsed by hundreds of lauded and respected (even nobel-prize-winning) economists then you haven't been looking, or you're using it as a cheap rhetorical appeal to suggest you are correct without argument. I hope it's the first scenario since then you are simply ignorant and not malicious which is no crime, in which case a simple google of "minimum wage" should suffice.
In the employment "negotiation" for low-skilled workers the businesses have all of the power and the workers have none. Businesses have run a successful propaganda campaign (and sometimes employed illegal thugs to wage a campaign of violence and intimidation) against the union movement whose goal was to give workers bargaining power through collective action and boycott so they are not completely abused and exploited. Some of their successes include, for example, the weekend, which without regulation or collective action would not exist.
The union movement has mostly died and so the government forces an absolute minimum the worker can give the business in the "negotiation" which is as much of a negotiation as an offer at gunpoint is, because the government knows without it businesses would take everything and we would quickly devolve into sweatshops/de facto slavery.
There are plenty of places in the world where there is no minimum. If you want a society that runs on sweatshops and slave labor just move. Unfortunately you can't have that in a healthy free democratic society, so most western democracies have chosen the latter.
People don't have an inherent "fair market value" -- their "fair market wage" as you say is simply a measure of how much the wealthy owning class can exploit their wealth and power in an ultracapitalist system in which all of the rules favor them.
If there are fewer people with your skills, you are harder to exploit, so your wages are higher -- until immigrants are imported to remedy the efficiency problem which is your living wage.
In the employment "negotiation" for low-skilled workers the businesses have all of the power and the workers have none. Businesses have run a successful propaganda campaign (and sometimes employed illegal thugs to wage a campaign of violence and intimidation) against the union movement whose goal was to give workers bargaining power through collective action and boycott so they are not completely abused and exploited. Some of their successes include, for example, the weekend, which without regulation or collective action would not exist.
The union movement has mostly died and so the government forces an absolute minimum the worker can give the business in the "negotiation" which is as much of a negotiation as an offer at gunpoint is, because the government knows without it businesses would take everything and we would quickly devolve into sweatshops/de facto slavery.
There are plenty of places in the world where there is no minimum. If you want a society that runs on sweatshops and slave labor just move. Unfortunately you can't have that in a healthy free democratic society, so most western democracies have chosen the latter.
People don't have an inherent "fair market value" -- their "fair market wage" as you say is simply a measure of how much the wealthy owning class can exploit their wealth and power in an ultracapitalist system in which all of the rules favor them.
If there are fewer people with your skills, you are harder to exploit, so your wages are higher -- until immigrants are imported to remedy the efficiency problem which is your living wage.