The problem is that one (keeping wages low) gets pushed, and the other does not.

Something tells me you would be perfectly happy if wages were kept super low, and the other things you said did not happen.

That is not a solution.

There was just an article yesterday about the owners of 7-11 making a net income of $37K a year. Small business owners aren’t getting rich.

If you don’t think that businesses don’t “deserve” to exist if there business model can’t be profitable at “livable wages” that seems hypocritical to me since a lot of techies work for companies that only exist because of VC funding and if their company had to exist based solely on profitability they wouldn’t be working either.

Whether a minimum wage in a certain situation makes sense or not depends on who is out of work and who is employed at below livable wages.

In an economy with high unemployment, a minimum wage should be lower. With low unemployment, it can be higher in order to put a lower limit on the employers' negotiating power.

If unemployment is low, the employer is going to have to offer higher wages anyway.

If the numbers don’t make sense, either the employer is going to automate or capital os going to move up market and to jobs that are out of reach for the unskilled.

If Apple bought iPhone manufacturing to the US for instance where it would be more expensive, they would invest in ways to automate more before they would hire the same number of people as FoxConn does.

In reality, low unemployment did not lead to significant wage increases at the bottom end of the spectrum, probably because of the negotiating power of the employers.

It looks like wage increases are less of a factor in automation than labor shortages. Which is why Foxconn in China is automating like crazy.