You want a higher minimum wage? This is what you get

Faced with economically illiterate progressives pushing for a higher minimum wage, the companies that actually employ people at minimum wage are taking steps that are totally predictable -- automating jobs out of existence. Wendy's is among the first of the biggies, but it won't be the last:

DUBLIN, Ohio (AP) — Wendy's says it plans to install self-ordering kiosks at about 1,000 locations by the end of the year.
A typical location would have three kiosks, The Columbus Dispatch reported. Higher-volume restaurants will be given priority for the kiosks.

Sounds like a lot of Wendy's cashiers are looking at unemployment which, regardless of the minimum wage, pays nothing. And for those of you who think this is the worst development ever, think again:

Customers will still be able to order at the counter for now, although Tristano predicts that mobile ordering and payment via smartphones will one day overtake self-ordering kiosks and cash registers.

And believe it, automation will replace a lot of people in the kitchen, too. Want to Fight for 15? The hundreds of people who still have jobs with the minimum wage at that level will thank you. So will the makers of automation systems that will replace the millions of unskilled former employees who are making the true minimum wage -- zero.

Did you expect something different?

I'm not sure why liberals think that increasing the cost of labor will not reduce the demand for labor, but, apparently, they don't. Instead, they keep pushing for increases in the federally mandated minimum wage. Naturally, since liberals tend to view things through the urban prism they live in, they fail to consider that maybe, just maybe, the minimum wage mandated for New York City should not be the same as the minimum wage in Wheeling, West Virginia. After all, the true minimum wage is zero. When it is no longer worth a business owner's while to hire an employee at the mandated rate, that would-be employee will not be hired:

As the labor union-backed Fight for $15 begins yet another nationwide strike on November 29, I have a simple message for the protest organizers and the reporters covering them: I told you so.
It brings me no joy to write these words. The push for a $15 starter wage has negatively impacted the career prospects of employees who were just getting started in the workforce while extinguishing the businesses that employed them. I wish it were not so. But it’s important to document these consequences, lest policymakers elsewhere decide that the $15 movement is worth embracing.

The article in Forbes quoted above is an op-ed by a former president CEO of McDonald's, a guy intimately familiar with the economics of the minimum wage. He isn't predicting the future, either. The things he talks about are already happening:

Let’s start with automation. In 2013, when the Fight for $15 was still in its growth stage, I and others warned that union demands for a much higher minimum wage would force businesses with small profit margins to replace full-service employees with costly investments in self-service alternatives. At the time, labor groups accused business owners of crying wolf. It turns out the wolf was real.
Earlier this month, McDonald’s announced the nationwide roll-out of touchscreen self-service kiosks. In a video the company released to showcase the new customer experience, it’s striking to see employees who once would have managed a cash register now reduced to monitoring a customer’s choices at an iPad-style kiosk.

Jobs at the entry level will go away, replaced by automation, robots and anything else that costs less over the long term than unskilled labor.

But wait! you cry. Many small businesses cannot afford to automate and so will still hire unskilled labor at the minimum wage, you might say. Um, maybe not:

Of course, not all businesses have the capital necessary to shift from full-service to self-service. And that brings me to my next correct prediction—that a $15 minimum wage would force many small businesses to lay off staff, seek less-costly locations, or close altogether.

The author goes on to cite a few examples, noting that as such wage policies go nationwide, the examples will proliferate. Read the whole thing. 

Hell, we don't listen to socialists because even socialists don't listen to socialists

Some socialist group in Seattle is not only not listening to socialists, they aren't even listening to themselves. Apparently, the Freedom Socialist Party either doesn't read its own propaganda, or else its leadership realizes how stupid their propaganda actually is. From Pundit Press:

It’s sometimes said that if some people didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all. That applies to the Freedom Socialist Party.
. . .
The people who want people who flip hamburgers for a living to earn $20 an hour to do that are willing to pay an experienced web developer… $13 an hour.

This isn't really surprising, of course. The minimum wage makes no sense, as it is simply an arbitrarily chosen number. Management has to set the price it pays labor at a point that attracts talent able to do the work but stays within the available resources. Apparently even socialists realize this. But because they are socialists, they want to rule everyone with rules for thee but not for me. To which I reply, of course, fuck thee and thy hypocrisy. I hope the rat bastards can't find a web designer who will work for less than $25 an hour. Hat tip to Instapundit.