News Flash: Laws of Economics Are Still in Effect

Morning Joe's Mika Brzezinski's confusion not withstanding, it should not come as any surprise that business owners will continue to innovate and lower their expenses in the face of rising labor costs.

The Wall Street Journal's opinion piece The Employee of the Month Has a Battery details the automation efforts of several restaurants utilizing tabletop ordering devices to replace waiters.

The exact same argument was made here in 2006 to counter the assertion that illegal immigration provides irreplaceable cheap labor:

...One can argue that cheap labor is keeping U.S.-based agriculture from further automating and reducing it's labor content...That cheap labor is providing a disincentive to fund further research and development that reduces the labor content in agriculture.

Along with the Homeland Security benefits of halting illegal immigration, we could see an increase in good ole' fashion American ingenuity that would lessen our dependency on cheap labor. Our future would see more innovations like trunk shaker machines, robotic fruit pickers, sheep shearing robots, satellite controlled harvesters and flexible agricultural automation.