It's in the best interest of every company to pay as
    little as the employee will take so every employee has
    to stand up for themselves.

That's true, if the company culture you're looking for is a back-stabbing dog-eat-dog climb-over-his-corpse kind of a thing, which some companies undoubtedly are, and some of those I'm sure are financially very successful, but it's not how I want to spend my week.

Otherwise I kind of agree with you.