Sen. Chris Murphy has finally found a constituency that truly gets him. Robots and automated systems around the country likely whirled and beeped with approval as he introduced the Senate version of the Living Wage for All Act. At a time when workers are being replaced at record numbers due to the cheaper labor of automated systems and AI programs, Murphy moved to price out millions of more workers by increasing their costs.
The bill would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $25 per hour — a 245 percent increase — over 12 years. The far-left senator is following the lead of states like California, where Democrats dramatically cut jobs through such wage increases.
Murphy went on NBC to insist that he is “not a democratic socialist” but then attacked capitalism:
“[T]he Democratic Party has been historically way too timid in taking on corporate power. I think we have to understand that people do not believe that this version of capitalism has worked. And frankly, it hasn’t worked. … This version of capitalism isn’t working. Now, I make the argument in the book that we should embrace, you know, what I call a common good capitalism.”
He then added:
“And by the way, we can afford it. It’s not like we can’t pay a $25 minimum wage; we just choose not to because we’ve become okay with dozens and dozens of people in this country making hundreds of billions of dollars.”
It is not clear who the “we” is. While securing a law degree, Murphy has never run a business and has spent his life as a politician, spending other people’s money.
I previously wrote about wage hikes and the predictable loss of jobs that followed.
Democratic politicians from New York to California are pushing for a $30 minimum hourly wage for workers. Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and Democratic legislators in California herald their mandatory increases as providing a “living wage” for workers. In Los Angeles, a law requires hourly wages in the hotel and airport industries to rise by $2.50 each year until they reach $30 in 2028.
There is no question that workers are struggling with the high cost of living in California. But blindly raising taxes and minimum wages will exacerbate these problems, not eliminate them.
A recent report by researchers at the University of California-Santa Cruz found evidence of precisely what many economists had warned about in the state’s mandatory wage floors. Stephen Owen, an economics lecturer, explained that they found “a plethora of negative outcomes, such as higher menu prices for consumers, reductions in employee working hours, widespread elimination of overtime, and loss of benefits for employees.”
In other words, faced with mandated higher labor costs, businesses shrank their labor forces and raised their prices.
None of this is a surprise. Yet even amid such findings, Democrats are doubling down. They believe that because they claim to be the champions of the working class, it does not matter how many people they put out of work.
It is not just workers feeling the brunt of such economically ill-considered measures. In California, a two-person meal can run about $30 due to higher labor costs being passed on to consumers. It is only a matter of time before robots replace these workers.
What is ironic is that the Democrats are hitting the most vulnerable members of the labor force with these minimum wage increases. In my book, “Rage and the Republic,” I discussed not only the economic changes unfolding due to AI and robotics but also the expected political miscalculations that are most likely to fuel job losses and wasteful spending. This is one of them.
As discussed in the book, certain industries are already likely to convert to automation due to increasing labor costs:
“For any wealth-maximizing, rational actor in the marketplace, the choice is obvious and inescapable. There is little reason for a restaurant to employ workers to make Happy Meals when they can be done by robotics without healthcare, wage issues, or scheduling conflicts. The very premise of McDonald’s is to produce the same meals in the exactly the same way from restaurant to restaurant. That is precisely what robotics do. They will make fries in exactly the same fashion over and over again without variation.”
Faced with this threat to the labor force, Murphy and others are moving to do the one thing to accelerate and expand the job losses by increasing the cost of human labor.
Ironically, giving the advantage to the robotic workforce could still work in favor of the growing socialist movement in the party. With more workers out of jobs, more will look to the government for support and a guaranteed income. That will further increase the role of the state. Of course, to expand what Zohran Mamdani called “the warmth of collectivism,” millions of human workers will have to be put out in the cold as an overpriced labor force. Citizens will then become what I have called a “kept population,” which could have a disastrous impact on the role of citizens in our unique Republic.
What is clear is that Murphy will prove to be the greatest friend a robot has ever had in Congress.
*. It’s AI deleting people. Larry Page and Elon Musk split over the flawed program that will eventually lead to the machine world. It repairs itself. Imagine star trek voyagers coming upon machine world and unable to escape.
That minimum wage laws cause unemployment is as widely known and undisputed as the fact that water flows downhill. Any worker who is not worth the new, higher wage, will be let go. And the employer will raise the price of goods and services, reducing demand for its product, causing further cuts to employment. Automation through robotics will become the rational economic choice for the producer, leading to even further cuts in employment. More unemployed workers means more dependence on government benefits.
Murphy knows all this and is out to grab power while inflicting dystopian misery on the rest of us. Why? Personal power and aggrandizement.
This suggestion by Murphy to slowly raise the minimum wage over 12 years is actually a very sensible and very modest approach.
Others have called for action that goes far beyond this attempt to simply raise the minimum wage.
They have proposed a Universal Basic Income, whereby all citizens simply get a basic income in the form of a check from the government, whether they are employed or not.
Obviously a radical, leftist, communist proposal, wouldn’t you agree.
Who is proposing this radical communist nonsense???
None other than Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, who is heavily invested in AI of his own.
Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI agrees with Musk that UBI paid by the government is inevitable.
https://www.citybiz.co/article/860050/elon-musk-sam-altman-and-andrew-yang-lead-the-modern-push-for-universal-basic-income/
In fact, Musk goes beyond the concept of the government providing a basic income as a floor. He suggests that the government should provide what he calls universal HIGH income, where by nobody has to work at all and nobody needs to save money.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/musk-predicts-ai-create-universal-high-income-make-saving-money-unnecessary
Turley has completely failed to do his research in regard to the effect of AI on the workforce. He is simply following the orders of his MAGA overlords at Fox and NY Post by publishing this nonsense.
Once again Turley is just throwing out red meat to agitate the MAGA mob.
He is simply stoking the very rage that he so hypocritically and disingenuously condemns
Another useless legislative fool, yet to be diagnosed as negative for stupid. Do not send to know who is elected. Rather send to know who voted. There in lies the rub. Curious that so many of these ‘blue meanies’ represent northern states of the 13 colonies. Just what kind of Kool-Aid are their constituenciesbeing fed?
Murphy never read Sowell.
In Econ 101 we learned the labor/capital trade-off. As labor becomes more expensive, people are replaced by machines. In California and other high-minimum-wage states, low-skill workers at fast food restaurants are being replaced by robots.
Unions have also contributed to the demise of labor. Last week GM replaced 1,000 workers with 50 robots on its assembly line at GM’s ‘Factory Zero’ where they assemble electric vehicles. This is not a new trend as GM has automated so much that labor-hours to create a vehicle have dropped 70% since the 1980s.
All this will do is cost more blue-collar workers their jobs. But then, the Democrats have long abandoned both sense and the working class, so I’m not surprised he’d push for some disastrous ‘feel good’ solution that will only harm low-skill and blue-collar workers.
Is this idea just a rehash of the clash of the originalist, free-market view of limited government against the modern legal framework of expansive federal power? He’s not fooling independent business owners and libertarian-minded individuals with this. It is just a further inroad of government into private liberty and is, basically, anathema to the founding father’s ethos – hence the 10th amendment.
Robots are coming to farms.
In some cases, they are already here.
Toured a dairy farm one county over. Has robot milkers. She said the upfront cost was a little shocking, but she crunched the math and it would pay for itself in about a year and a half. That was over two years ago.
Seen a prototype for a robot that can identify weeds and using micro waves. A lot cheaper than chemicals and the big sprayer.
Reports of a robot that can pick vegetables faster and better than a human.
As a teen, I worked in fast food. I can see someone building a assembly line like robot. Just need two or three humans to load up the hopper of frozen beef patties and buns, or the frozen fries.
Farming is relatively difficult to automate – but efforts to do so have been under way for a long time – in Many niches of farming – migrant workers have been critical both to quality and to cost – but farmers do not like being constantly raided and fined – replacing migrant workers with automation is a win win.
Automation is not new. Whether it is Adam Smith’s pin factory the spinning Jenny, the Cotton Gin and on and on.
Standard of living rises when More of what humans value is produced with less human effort.
Several posters – left and right have made arguments here – recently and the past that are essentially permutations of a
“labor theory of value” – that is crap. The purpose of human effort is to PRODUCE – not to fill time.
The LESS effort and the MORE produced the better off we are. Your time is worth nothing – it is what you produce with that time that has value.
If you can produce more in less time – all the better.
This is also why the “evil” uber rich are a necessitate – Whether it is men with shovels being replaced by backhoes or fruit pickers being replaced by robots – reducing the amount of human effort needed to produce something by using Capital to buy backhoes or robot cherry pickers – makes us better off.
If you are a taxi driver or an uber driver or a truck driver – you should be retraining and looking for other work now. Automated vehicles are coming – as fast as we can make them happen.
Frankly the upper limit on automation replacing humans is a combination of the limited amount of capital we have and the limited amount of skilled people we have creating assorted robots and automation. One of the things I do is embedded software – there are infinitely more potential uses for embedded computing than there are people able to develop those devices.
These idiots are their own downfall. The downside of too much wealth creates a citizenry full of laziness.
What many people don’t know, is that a large number of jobs (especially Union jobs) are based on a percentage higher than the Minimum Wage. The current Federal Minimum wage is $7.25/hour. Let’s say a Union has negotiated their personnel will ALWAYS be paid 400% of the Federal Minimum Wage. Their current pay would be $29/hour, however, if this went into effect, their pay would be mandated to be increased to $120/hour ($30*4). The poor would still make no headway, they would just be a higher level of broke!
Labor unions negotiate specific, fixed hourly dollar amounts (e.g., $29.00/hour) with scheduled annual increments (e.g., a $1.50 raise per year). They do not use open-ended percentage multipliers tied to federal law. If a union contract locks in a $29.00 rate, that rate remains $29.00 regardless of whether Congress moves the federal minimum wage to $10.00, $15.00, or $30.00.
In the rare instances where a union contract explicitly mentions the minimum wage, it is structured as a safety floor, not a multiplier. For example, a contract might state: “Workers will be paid $25.00 an hour, or $2.00 above the prevailing statutory minimum wage, whichever is higher.”
Under the current $7.25 federal rate, the worker makes $25.00 (because $25.00 is higher than $7.25 + $2.00).
If the minimum wage rose to $30.00, the contract formula would kick in to ensure the worker makes $32.00 ($30.00 + $2.00). It would never shoot up to $120.00.