Here's a question. Both market concentration (as in oligopoly) and unemployment have significant downward effects on wages especially in the low end of the labor market. I don't like minimum wage and I wish we didn't have it but it's the best solution I've seen to these problems. Do you have a solution to these problems?
But I don't follow how solving that problem addresses markets becoming concentrated and member firms using that advantage to push wages down towards subsistence levels. That I think requires some sort of collective bargaining, which minimum wage is a type of (although it's likely not the best.)
Markets work to coordinate prices for both consumers and producers. Those who resist the laws of markets pay eventually. Might not happen right away but it happens-always.
My point is that low wages are never good exactly but they can be better if those wages pay for more year over year. It's like getting a raise without having to negotiate or even do anything for it.
He also didn't think wages would make it to subsistence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages#Socialist_cr...
Wake me when there's an affordable machine that can clean my office as well as a human. And no, I don't mean a Roomba - they're toys.
This capitalist techno-utopianism is totally divorced from the real world. Even automated checkouts (which have been around for over a decade) still haven't eliminated cashiers and for good reason - because people suck at using them.