Caliburger, a fast food chain with an outlet in Pasadena, Calif., is now using a robot to cook their burgers. It’s called, in an outburst of inventiveness, Flippy. This is just what happens with a minimum wage: the incentive to automate is increased and thus workers lose their jobs.

Of course, every business tries to automate as much of its processes as it can. Who wants to pay wages when they don’t have to? The point is that robots, just machines, have costs. So too does a robot’s human substitute. Whether to automate depends upon the relative costs of the two things: the wages paid to labor and the interest paid to capital. Low interest rates make automation cheaper, high wages make human labor more expensive.