In the hyper-competitive restaurant industry, margins are slim — White Castle VP Jamie Richardson says that, in a typical year, White Castle hopes to achieve a net profit of between 1 and 2 percent — and if labor costs go up, many restaurants will turn toward labor-cost-cutting automation or business models that don’t require many employees. That means a lot of kids won’t get that first job. After decades of baggage check-in kiosks at airports, ATMs, and self-check-out lines at the supermarket, is it really so hard to imagine automation replacing the kid behind the counter at burger joints?

To Richardson and White Castle, New York’s minimum-wage hike is a threat to a culture of opportunity in the neighborhoods that they have always called home. “Candidly, this could create a whole generation of kids who won’t get their first job,” Richardson laments. “We’re in tough neighborhoods — and White Castle hasn’t abandoned those neighborhoods. On the surface, higher pay seems noble, but it’s not — because it denies the reality of the free-enterprise framework that has allowed small businesses like ours to thrive.”

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Jerry Brown when signing California’s $15 minimum wage bill said it made ‘moral’ sense but it did not make ‘economic’ sense. Apparently what Brown meant was: it’s a “moral” imperative to harm the poor, and he intends to do it via the minimum-wage.