• The fully-realized cost of labor is that which allows it to survive and support its family, and educate its progeny. A business which cannot afford to pay a living wage is effectively demanding a societal subsidy. While there are circumstances in which that social welfare might be reasonably extended, it seems to me that it's a decision which should be made deliberately, and that companies which show recurring high levels of profit while being unwilling to pay a living wage are prima facie proof of a market failure.
• The inherent negotiating advantage of employers means that it will virtually always prevail in wage negotiations with labor.
• There's a common misperception that people are paid what they're worth to a company. This isn't the case. Rather: in a well-functioning and competitive market, your wage will always be less than you're worth. Much as a manufacturer's printer PPM rating is best interpreted as "performance never to be exceeded", your true worth to a company always sets an absolute ceiling on what your pay will be. Exceptions exist where markets are not well-functioning: e.g., in the case of excecutive pay, where there's a strong level of capture between execs and payment committees, and in which pay serves not only a compensation but a market signalling role as to the health and robustness of the firm (it's effectively a social signaling Veblen good).
For all of these reasons, defining a minimum wage at roughly the level of a living wage is strongly congruent with Adam Smith's principles. See Chapter X, Book I, Wealth of Nations.
Not a good analogy, because the full "conservative" (and libertarian) argument is that if you find yourself in such a situation, minimum wage laws produce a discontinuity in the labor market: if the current value of your labor is less than the minimum wage, you won't get a job at all.
Associate with this is the idea that it's better to have a job, any job ... the fate of the long term unemployed we're seeing right now as they lose general job skills is telling.
Completely related, if you're just starting out, and the value of your labor is not yet at the minimum wage, you never get into the job market in the first place. You never learn those implicit general jobs skills and discipline, like showing up to work on time. (OK, you just might find a place in the underground economy, but forcing people into that is very, very bad.)
It's the successful pulling up the ladder behind them ... something people like us rarely see (well, until we're 35-40 and unemployable for standard salaried programming positions). And therefore utterly evil.
Any way to bring this back to the general conversation?
First, the government does not have its thumbs on the scales: you will not go to jail for just trying to compete with Google,
And is it really that impossible to compete with Google in plenty of big places? Companies like Fastmail suggest it isn't (speaking from personal experience). That Duck Duck Go can even get some mind share is suggestive. What about Apple's mapping stuff?
There's also regression to the mean, which I sure see Google doing. I use them only for search and maps (punted Docs when they started going Google+ account name etc. crazy), and their search is steadily becoming less useful/harder to get what I want. I am a ringer in that I've been doing full text search stuff since the very early 90s, but....
So I suggest not making an entirely static analysis of this. Google today: hard to impossible ... to almost trivially easy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7467165). Google tomorrow? Probably better chances. Google in the next decade ... well, the way to bet is that at some point we'll be picking over its bones. Within my expected lifespan, at least.