What Should Minimum Wage Be?
March 10, 2010
Zero, of course.
In a great article published yesterday by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution–which does seem to be diversifying a little bit to the right in its editorial page, a welcome change–Richard Burkhauser makes the point that if we are serious about reducing unemployment—particularly among the young and inexperienced, who if allowed to remain chronically un-and under-employed, will create all sorts of headaches down the road—then politicians need to revisit the 40% increase in the minimum wage passed in 2007. Well, duh.
Cutting the Basic Wage to Spur Jobs
It’s just common sense, so much so as to be, effectively, axiomatic: the artificial inflation of the cost of goods and services—which is exactly what happens with a “minimum wage”—messes up the economy. When government meddles in what ought to be private affairs—even when government does it with the best of intentions—the train goes off the tracks. It is so predictable as to be laughable that when employers are forced to pay employees more than the employees are worth, there will be less employees doing more work.
Progressive politicians don’t understand this—or if they do, they are simply evil people. Because it hurts everyone when the minimum wage is increased—everyone. The price of goods and services go up, and/or the quality of goods and services goes down, and/or the unemployment rolls increase. There’s simply no way around that, because to think otherwise is to subscribe to what I call the “Big Bag o’ Money Theory” about business: businesses have a big bag o’ money just sitting around collecting interest and dust, and it’s a bag o’ money that business ought to be sharing with others, so when the government passes silly laws to make businesses give more money to its employees, it’s as simple as digging into the big bag o’ money and divvying up “their fair share”.
And leprechauns will soon be flying out of…somewhere.
Want to put people back to work? At the very least, create a second minimum wage targeted at the young unemployed. Get ‘em working for, say, $5 an hour. They won’t get rich—minimum wage won’t make anybody rich, nor should it—but they’ll get working. And they’ll help business. And they’ll develop skills and prove their merit and all sorts of good things that are currently being blocked by this monstrosity we call “minimum wage”.
Obama: Rescuing Everyone from the Truth
January 1, 2010
Great piece by Roger Scruton on the difference between conservative and liberal thinking, and why Europeans love Comrade Obama so much that they awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize:
Global Warming: It’s the Real Deal!
December 29, 2009
Or it was, I guess…
The following is paraphrased from an article in the Washington Post entitled “Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt”:
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
Well, OK, I guess Algore is right; there is clear evidence of global warming; here, by the way, is the original.
Oh, wait a minute…when was this written, you ask? Let me check…yes, there it is! It’s dated November.
November NINETEEN TWENTY-TWO.
Or, said another way, roughly fifty years prior to the scare (that I remember well) about “global cooling” and the coming of a new Ice Age.
Welcome to Harry Reid’s Banana Republic of America
December 22, 2009
This, my friends, is unbelievable. No, check that; given the lack of anything resembling decency on the part of so much of our Congress, and particularly its “leadership”, this is entirely believable:
Private Sector Experience Not Needed
December 17, 2009
Not in the Obama administration, at least.
We’re nearly a year into our latest presidential experiment. After our 8-year “let’s see what happens when we turn the government over to a teenager” approach (we call that the “Clinton Administration”), and another 8-year experiment we can label “let’s see what happens when we turn the government over to a ‘conservative’ who doesn’t see the redundancy between ‘compassionate’ and ‘conservative’” (the semi-disaster we call the “Bush II Administration”), we’re now hip-deep into the “let’s see what happens when we turn the government over to an utterly inexperienced leftist” experiment. Thankfully, the president’s poll numbers are dropping like a rock; after my shock that any American would vote for such a woefully-underqualified man for president, maybe the polls help restore a smidgen of my faith in the American public–but I digress…the point of this post is to ask you to go and look at a graphical representation of the lack of private sector experience of Comrade Obama’s cabinet appointees, in comparison with the other presidents since Teddy Roosevelt. Hint: the difference between this one, and all the rest, is stark and scary.
No wonder we’re getting the “solutions” we’re being offered…
Lindsey Graham v. Eric Holder
November 24, 2009
It’s a smackdown. Lindsey Graham, with whom I disagree on any number of things, nonetheless does a stellar job of grilling the hapless Eric Holder regarding the travesty of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow animals in New York City. You need to watch this:
And further: today’s editorial on the Obama Administration’s horrible decision is worth the read.
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Osborne: A Contrarian's Guide to Knowing God
Schlossberg: Idols For Destruction
