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”.
Jim Bunning is an American Hero
March 4, 2010
The quirky senator from Kentucky has gotten a lot of bad press lately, and I even confess to wondering, “why now, Jim? Why this particular bill?” I think Mr. Bunning answers that question quite nicely in this piece:
Even the libertarian in me was sitting the fence on this one, but no more: Jim Bunning is an American hero. May his tribe increase.
Stossel on Education
February 18, 2010
Public education doesn’t work. If that fact isn’t as plain as the noses on our faces, we’re ignoring reality. Before I go further, quick aside: I always, when I write on education issues, try to be careful to signal my profound appreciation for the many good public school teachers/administrators out there, who take their jobs seriously, who put their students’ achievement ahead of their own advancement, who sacrifice to help prepare kids for society. Among these are many fine Christians who see their calling as taking their faith into the classroom–muted as they are required to be about it. I salute them, applaud them, and appreciate them.
But they are fighting, I believe, a losing battle. And not to recognize that fact is to doom us to continue the failed educational policies of the past half-century.
The fact is that, as Stossel points out, the elitists in control, from Comrade Obama on down, see more government involvement in our schools as a good thing, when the facts at hand argue just the opposite. We spend more; we get no discernible results. Right now, we are spending a boatload of money on public education, with little to show for it; there is effectively no correlation between the amount of money spent on education and the results in the lives of the students (remember that the next time they want to raise your taxes to support education). As Stossel concludes, “choice works, but government monopolies don’t.” And he’s right.
Truthers, Birthers…and Racers
February 17, 2010
I think it’s time to introduce a new word into our political discourse to designate a very real, and dangerous, group of fringe wingnuts. We’ve got the “Truthers”, crazies who think that the U.S. government was behind 9/11. Incidentally, Glenn Beck did the citizens of Texas a real service this past week when he exposed a gubernatorial candidate–a Tea Partier, of all folks–as a “Truther”. Debra Medina, who has about pulled even in the polls with the sinking Kay Bailey Hutchison (thankfully, trailing Governor Rick Perry by a significant margin), told Glenn that, effectively, she hasn’t really weighed all the evidence, and thus hasn’t reached a conclusion, about whether or not the government was behind 9/11. Thanks for playing, Ms. Medina, but you’re a kook–even if you and I agree on a lot of Tea Party issues. If you are a “Truther”, or even if you entertain the possibility that they’re onto something, you scare Americans with a brain.
On the other side of the coin, politically, are the “Birthers”, folks who continue to press the idea that Comrade Obama wasn’t born in the United States. They produce “evidence”–equally spurious to that produced by the “Truthers”–to supposedly buttress their claims. They deserve to be dismissed as kooks as well.
But there’s a third category of people that ought to be placed alongside “Truthers” and “Birthers”; let’s call them “Racers”. Keith Olbermann goes to the top of the list of “Racers”, continuing to find racist motives behind the Tea Party movement, for instance, fabricating evidence from his own fertile imagination in the absence of anything approximating proof. I referred in a recent post to a professor at Atlanta’s Spellman College, who protested a pro-life ad (an ad condemning the genocide of African-American babies) as “racist”. Chris Mathews “forgot that Barack Obama was a black man” during the State of the Union. These folks find race in everything; these folks are convinced that racism underlies everything that people (well, conservative people) do. And so, to Olberclown and his ilk, the Tea Party has to be racist at root–ignoring mounds of evidence to the contrary and choosing to look through their pink-colored glasses and find what’s not there. Are there racists in the Tea Party movement? Certainly–just as there are racists in groups right and left all across American society. Is racism a genuine evil, a terrible scourge on this country? Absolutely. Is racism an issue in which America has made leaps and bounds of progress? Only a fool oblivious to the evidence would argue otherwise. But is the fact that many Americans are fed up with the economic agenda of the Bush/Obama administration (yes, you heard me) evidence that, because Comrade Obama is a black man, we’re racist? Preposterous–but not to the “Racers”. I propose we add that term to our political jargon, because “Racers” deserve exactly as much attention and credibility as “Truthers” and “Birthers”.
Krauthammer Nails It
January 25, 2010
Funniest and best point Krauthammer makes is in response to Comrade Obama’s silly sentiment, when he said that Scott Brown was elected “not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”
Right, says Krauthammer in effect, so let us get this straight: Massachusetts voters are still so ticked at George W. Bush that they elect a Republican senator to Teddy Kennedy’s seat. Priceless.
A Moment of Mourning, Y’all
January 21, 2010
I’m sorry, were they still operating? On what, 11 channels with 138 listeners total or something?
And the amazing thing is, liberals won’t learn from this (witness the blame-shifting in the article; it’s “the economy”…snicker, snicker); they are so out-of-touch and tone-deaf to the American public that they won’t realize what should be obvious: liberal programming doesn’t work because people instinctively know a good, logical argument based on reason when they see one–and “arguments” based on mushy feelings, ad hominem attacks, and name-calling get old real fast.
Where the Tea Parties Ought to Go
January 21, 2010
OK, so we’ve got this great, grass-roots movement, fueled by deep-seated concern that this country has been off-track for a long time, predating the Obama administration, by the way (and categorically not, as the arrogant and out-of-touch Keith Olbermann would have us believe, a thinly-veiled racism. Really, Keith, you should get out of your patrician Upper West Side digs a little more often and rub shoulders with the hoi polloi; you might actually begin to understand what you’re talking about.). Sorry for the digression, but that buffoon brings out the worst in me and most other sane people I know…
So the question is, where does the Tea Party movement go from here? Here’s my proposal: like the tremendous “Contract with America” proposed by Newt Gingrich in 1994, which swept Republicans into office, we need some similar bullet-list of demands we put on aspiring Congresspeople…yes, demands we put on them (isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? Unfortunately, these days, it seems like it’s the other way around–one of the myriad things we’re sick of.). And once we compile the modest list of demands, we ask any/every aspiring politician to sign off on the list. Sign it, you may get our vote; don’t sign it, and we target you for removal from office. Let me throw out a few of my ideas:
* “I pledge to end the process by which earmarks and various proposals make their way onto utterly unrelated legislation.” It is infuriating that slimy politicians will tack various legislative proposals onto unrelated pieces of legislation and then force other politicians into needlessly difficult choices. It’s a political game, and it needs to end. Now. And it ought to be part of our list of demands.
* “I pledge to make Congress live by the exact same rules that it forces upon the American public.” We don’t have patricians in Washington (actually, we do, but we’re not supposed to); we’re supposed to have citizen-legislators, and they ought to live by the same health care and retirement rules, for instance, that they make us live by.
* “I pledge never to vote, for any reason, for a bill which increases the federal deficit.” Need more money? Cut something. We do it in our household budgets; learn Economics 101 and do the same in D.C.
* “I pledge to vote to sunset the tax code within 5 years.” The federal tax code is a racket, the IRS is a filthy organization, and the way taxation is used to manipulate American citizens is un-American. I favor the Fair Tax, a consumption tax, which is infinitely better in principle than an income tax, but if not the Fair Tax, find another system; anything but the continuation of business as usual.
I believe that if you kept the list of demands to 5-7 at the most, and particularly if you kept them away from some partisan issues (prospective Congresspeople would still have their different stances on these–and we could determine how to address their beliefs accordingly), then you’d gain broad-based, bi-partisan support, and could really have a movement that would change a lot of the way things are done in Washington. I think a significant majority of Americans from all parties could agree on the things I’ve outlined above, even abolishing the IRS. And if the politicians didn’t play ball, sayonara.
What say you, and what would you add to this list? I’ll probably think of a couple other things myself which I reserve the right to go back and add in an update…
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
