Many labor market regulations transfer wealth or job security to the already-employed at the expense of the unemployed, and these have been increasing over time.

One example: raising the minimum wage makes lower-productivity workers permanently unemployable, because their work is not worth the price, so no one can afford to hire them any more.

When the government raises minimum wage, it effectively funds the development of automation, as businesses seek replacements for low-end labor. (Like Amazon buying that robotics company to build warehouse management robots.)

Heck, you could almost say that AI doesn't cause unemployment; the need for unemployment causes AI. When labor cost increases without a productivity gain, there has to be a productivity gain to make up for it, and the pain of the increase motivates businesses to actually look for alternatives to their current ways of doing something.

So every time the minimum wage goes up, companies will replace more and more of their former minimum wage workers with automation. Somehow, the politicians never catch on to this, or they know and don't care. It makes me want to scream every time I get a promotional email from some organization talking about how evil low wages are and how the minimum wage needs to be raised. Don't they know they are going to make jobs go away, basically forever?