How the Minimum Wage Helps Tech

Creative destruction is the process whereby innovation replaces existing economic structures with new ones. Countries that embrace creative destruction, like England during the Industrial Revolution or Deng Xiaoping's post-Mao trade-friendly China, leave some behind but flourish as a whole. Problems arise when the elites quash creative destruction for their own benefit. When Francis I of Austria-Hungary banned the construction of railroads and factories in the early 1800s to preserve his feudal agrarian order, the empire's economy suffered leading to poverty and famine. Today, with a combination of increasing minimum wages and near-zero federal interest rates, our governments are incentivizing, not quashing, creative destruction.