Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

While economically sound, I'm skeptical this process can go on forever. The human biology and mind is clearly limited, while the progress of machines does not seem to be. So eventually you will hit a fundamental limit where larger and larger chunks of the workforce will simply be too old, uneducated or simply too human to keep up.

How close we are to this fundamental limit it's anyone's guess, but I would venture to say we are closer than most think. At the point where a serious part of the population is unable to participate in the labor market, this ceases to be an appropriate system to distribute the fruits of economic activity and some form of basic income is required to maintain social order.

Do you know what happens when real countries try to impose a limit on the price of bread? Starvation. The Soviet Union tried to establish a limit on the price of bread. Since the actual cost to grow wheat, bake bread, and transport it to cities was high, the supply chain couldn't make a profit (or even break even) selling at the government-specified price. So they stopped, and mass food shortages resulted. That's what happens when you tamper with the economy. Gorbachev finally fixed the problem by transitioning away from a planned economy to a free market: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/23/world/evolution-in-europe-...

By allowing the price of bread to rise significantly, bakers and bread suppliers could finally turn a profit (i.e., not take a loss) selling bread, and so they began to do so. This is how the market forces of supply and demand lead to efficiency and achieve the right outcome. For example, if a crisis happens, then food becomes scarce; when food is scarce, people are willing to pay a high price for it; and because people are willing to pay a high price, this creates an incentive for people to go to extraordinary lengths to provide food there and reap the benefit of that high price.

If you establish a price floor, then you're tampering with the economy in a complex way. You had better be prepared to reason about the economic deadweight loss (e.g., unemployment, shortages) that will result, and you should be prepared to provide a thorough justification for why the benefit of that legislation justifies the cost you're imposing on the economy through deadweight loss.

Equating jobs to slavery is an outrageous argument, and disingenuous. Slavery is the act of taking away someone's freedom and forcing them to work for you without choice. Jobs are a free market - anyone is free to work a job that's offered to them, or not. They can quit and look for a better alternative. That is the market pressure that forces wages up: if employees have a better option, they'll take it.

But as a business owner, when the cost of your inputs increases, the question you're faced with is not "how can I keep my current profitability levels" (which is often not possible anyway) but "how can I maximize profit given the new environment".

For example, if you're the owner of a restaurant with one or two or even four servers, you often can't fire any without significantly affecting your level of service, which could lose you even more money than you would save in salaries.

As far as I know, the literature on the subject is pretty much inconclusive, with studies pointing to a significant negative effect, while others indicate a negligible or even slightly positive effect.

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.