Howard Beal wrote:

Automation will advance regardless of what the minimum wage is. In the very
near future many manual
labor jobs will become obsolete, remember meter readers? The big question
that no one has an answer
for is what will all the displaced under educated workers do to earn a
living. The cost to society will be
great.

The problem is far worse than that actually. There is a current myth
that higher education will somehow eliminate the problem, but the
fundamental issue is not education, it is the fact that a smaller and
smaller percentage of the population is required to produce everything
the population needs. This means that you can have free higher ed. and
end up with soup kitchen lines full of PhDs with no jobs. What will
happen to wages for those high skilled jobs when there are 100 fully
qualified applicants for every available position? Can a Ph.D. engineer
operate a septic pumping truck better than a high school dropout? Will
that Ph.D. provide any advantage in finding a job when none are
available?