A colleague of mine once employed a young woman as a secretary/admin assistant. One day her family advised him that they had arranged a marriage for her and as

A colleague of mine once employed a young woman as a secretary/admin assistant. One day her family advised him that they had arranged a marriage for her and as she was no longer living with them she and her new husband would both qualify for unemployment benefits. If my colleague refused to pay her the equivalent of two unemployment benefits (after tax) she would resign. The next week she did. Perhaps we should think of unemployment benefits and minimum wage laws as a subsidy for technological progress, in particular automation and artificial intelligence. Low-wage workers are competition for automation, at least in the early stages when a new technology is just getting off the ground. Remove them, and there is likely to be more demand for technological solutions to do what they used to do. In the long run, everybody wins by giving private enterprise an incentive for more automation.