If we automate most of the manufacturing and other low skill jobs then you will be left with part of society that do not have predispositions/are not smart enough for creative/high skill jobs. And this accounts for a LOT of people. Education will not help in that, this are the people that couldn't get through education system in the first place, that's why they don't have any/low education.
A lot of service jobs are driven out by high cost of doing business; entrenched existing businesses are the source of re-election funding.
My neighbor bakes nice cookies. I have programmer money. You can guess whats supposed to happen here, but legally can't happen. Some education might help a little with WRT food safety, but it doesn't matter because the purpose of the government is to prevent her from going into the cookie baking business and compete with existing processed food factories.
The ultimate micro-brew isn't some multinational corporation spending lots of money on branding, but its the guy down the block. That of course is incredibly illegal, because the multinational corporation decides whats legal or illegal.
My wife's favorite hairdresser became unemployed due to the cost of health insurance; for awhile she cut hair at home on the side, but the .gov comes down heavy on that for obvious financial reasons.
Some sort of ideal world for lower IQ / lower functioning people would require better government. Rather than the government existing solely to protect Nabisco Inc sales, you'd have to refocus it entirely on safety and small business support services so my neighbor can sell cookies.
If my neighbor did all the homemade baked goods for my entire subdivision, I'm not entirely sure she's be poor, either. If she ran a 50% profit margin and everyone in my subdivision dropped $2/day for baked goods service (like she'd hand deliver you a hot loaf of bread every day?) that would be 6012500*0.50=$180K profit per year, not bad for an area where the median household income is a hair under $60K. Of course the purpose of the government it to annihilate small businesses in favor of large businesses.
Your examples are poorly chosen, but the general argument that government regulations exist to protect entrenched business interests is nonsense. Regulations exist for consumer protection, and regulatory compliance is highly unlikely to be the biggest barrier to entry in any business category.
They may have originally been created to protect consumers, but they've been manipulated and lobbied for so long that they now exist to protect entrenched business interests.
Repeating the argument does not make it more correct. If you're trying to contradict the idea that government regulations are not a large barrier to entry you might show some evidence, preferably in the form of a peer-reviewed study. Your study should also compare the externalized costs of not having said regulations. Even better would be to admit that you've been drawn into a ridiculous position and exit the conversation with as much grace as you can muster.
Samuel Johnson springs to mind, but if you'd like, substitute "contradict the argument of my previous post". I would prefer that phrasing, but I've often been disappointed at the tendency of people to take issue with small ambiguities or details at the expense of the actual argument.
