Just a reminder

Since President Obama and his pals are hell-bent on increasing the minimum wage, or actually just jawing about it, here's how the private sector deals with such things:

Hamburgers are a multi-billion dollar business, and while fast food chains have got the process down to an efficient production line process, making them is still labor intensive with armies of burger flippers and sandwich assemblers. In a move that could put millions of teenagers around the world out of their first job, Momentum Machines is creating a hamburger-making machine that churns out made-to-order burgers at industrial speeds and aims to use it in its own chain of restaurants.

Add a few self-pay registers and suddenly we're back at the Automat. Except that the Automat actually had a staff. Of course, that's not the point of this exercise. John Hayward explains the point quite nicely:

Obama’s executive order on behalf of federal contractors will surely add muscle to the Democrats’ push for a general minimum wage increase.  As noted above, he’ll describe his order in that context during the State of the Union address tonight, urging Congress to follow his lead and and hike the minimum wage for everyone.  This will, in turn, alter the pay scale calculations for private-sector union employees who make far more money already, because the federal minimum wage is a major factor in their salary formula.  ”And now you see why raising the minimum wage is such an intense priority for Democrats,” writes Greghty.  ”A higher minimum wage means higher wages for union workers, which means higher union dues, which gives unions more money to spend during campaign season.”

Don’t discount the appeal of higher unemployment due to higher minimum wages to socialist ideologues, either.  This is Nirvana for them – a perfect state of higher unemployment (which means greater dependence on government) combined with public animosity towards the private sector, which the Left would very much like to make smaller.  Nothing is better for them than a teeming horde of long-term unemployed who can be persuaded that greedy corporate executives who refuse to pay a fair wage are the reason for their distress, while benevolent Big Government stands ready to help them.  When you’ve got full employment, who needs the welfare state?  How is the Left supposed to cultivate seething resentment from a fully-employed populace that might not be inclined to hate the people who employ them?

You need a client base. This is all about the client base.