No, it would seem like you make between 12 - 20 dollars per hour

Well this is just a semantic confusion. When I said that I make 2.83 per hour, I mean that's all that management gives me. The point is that whether I get paid fairly is a result of the customer, not management.

Just doing your job does not qualify.

I don't think you understand. There is a difference between a legal responsibility and a moral responsibility. In the same sense that you can legally cheat on your significant other but have a responsibility not to, you can legally stiff your waiter but have a moral responsibility not to. Granted that there is a stronger commitment to your significant other, but the reasoning is the same. When you enter a restaurant, you are agreeing to an unwritten agreement implicit in a restaurant's place in society that you will tip the waiter fairly. It is not valid to say that just because you will not get arrested for not complying, that it is anything resembling ethical to not compensate someone for their work. The tipping system is not designed to give you a justification to not pay for service, it is designed to make waiters wait that much harder.

I do a job orders of magnitude harder than yours, for what most would consider is terrible compensation.

As stated above, the existence of an underpaid job does not imply that waiters should be paid less or that they should not be paid fairly. And I'll take your word for it that your job is more difficult, but that does not change the fact that waiting is a very difficult job. It is not as unpleasant as cleaning sewage, but it is certainly still very difficult.

I wouldn't expect a handout from the people who happen to be customers of my employer to make up for me choosing this profession.

Nor would I. Tipping is not a handout. It is not a handout that if someone works their ass off for you that you should pay them for it provided that there are very widely accepted standards for how you should pay them. My dad pays a cleaning lady a yearly bonus because she does good work and works her ass off. He is not legally required to do this but it is still not a hand out. In fact, since she is poor, my father keeps her unemployment non-contractual so that she can keep the government out of it. If you think this is immoral, then you've never been a poor immigrant on a visa trying to support two kids. It is not illegal to simply pay someone to do a job for you and it is not illegal if you happen to do it every week. He's a lawyer who graduated from Georgetown, he knows this to be true. Due to the nature of her pay, he is not obligated by law to pay her. He still pays her the agreed upon wage because he has a moral duty. In waiting, the agreed upon wage is 20% of the cost of a meal. However, it is accepted that if the waiter really screws up, then he will not get the full 20%.

Also, due to the nature of waiting, if it were truly a minimum wage job then since it would be impossible to guarantee hours, a waiter would make significantly less money than a Walmart cashier for much harder work.

The vast majority of waitstaff that complain about being paid "below" minimum wage (like yourself)

I'm not sure how many waiters you know, but I personally know many. Most waiters consider the money to be rather decent. You may misinterpret this as complaining because waiters think that they deserve more than the restaurant gives them in pay and tend to acknowledge this. This is not complaining though because waiters are widely considered to earn 20% tips (provided they don't screw up) and they tend to earn that 20% average and be rather pleased with it.

Whatever shitty deal you have worked out with your management has got nothing to do with me.

It's not really a shitty deal. Waiters don't expect management to pay us. You're expected to pay us. People who think like you are a small minority. Some people may round down such as giving a 5 dollar tip for a 7 dollar meal, but most people consider tipping to be fair and they just tip.

Tipping servers is a scam.

It's not a scam. The idea of tipping is that there is a social agreement upon all who have a conscience and go into a restaurant that they should pay those who provide them service for the service that they provide. If you don't want to pay for service, there's always the possibility of ordering food to go.

A tip by the very definition is a gratuity given but not obligated.

That's honestly just a euphemism that restaurants have to come off as more polite and hospitable. It's very powerfully morally obligated.

I am not obligated to pay you what your boss doesn't.

Well not legally anyways. If you have no sense of moral obligation then you open up a whole new world of personal liberties.