The minimum wage is a trade off. You create e.g. 10% unemployment so that the ~4.3% of people who make the minimum wage (and still have jobs) can make $7.25/hour instead of $5 or $3. There is a legitimate question as to whether this is the right trade off, but people seem to be in favor of it.
A food, anyway, provided you aren't spending your $8 a day on rent.
How would social services work in this system without minimum wage? Would people making below a minimum wage deemed necessary to house and feed and care for oneself be eligible for benefits?
When you have the choice between a job that pays $10 and a job that pays $7.25, you generally pick the one that pays $10. When the choice is between $7.25 and $4 or $4 and $1 the choice is similarly obvious. But so is the choice between making $8/day and buying eight pounds of pasta/rice/beans/etc. or being unemployed and hungry.
> How would social services work in this system without minimum wage? Would people making below a minimum wage deemed necessary to house and feed and care for oneself be eligible for benefits?
That's how it works already. People making minimum wage qualify for government benefits that phase out at higher income levels.
The poor state of travel and communication at the time. You couldn't exactly hitchhike to the nearest city with a public library and find work via the internet in 1938.
Perhaps a "necessity" in the sense that it's a necessary outcome of a system designed like that.
E.g., you build an engine according to the principles of thermodynamics in this universe, a necessary outcome is wasted heat. The engine would not work if you prohibited the waste; or it would become something else entirely (not a Carnot machine anymore, or whatever).
The trick is to figure out a system where the necessary outcomes are not very undesirable. Pretty hard to do that with the entire human society.