At the core of modern liberalism

Modern liberalism pats itself on the back for having good intentions even if the policies modern liberals pursue obviously don't work.

So whether it's stripping U.S. citizens of their right to work for whatever wage they want (via the minimum wage law), or stripping U.S. citizens of the right to defend themselves (via gun control), what matters most to the liberal mindset is that their "good intentions" were revealed to all.

Bill Bonner's Unique Point on the "Living Wage"

Image Courtesy of Getty Images

The point is at least unique to me. I've never heard any other free-market person make the following point about the "living wage":

Of course, a national living wage is absurd. It costs far more to live in Manhattan than in the Ozarks. And it is far less expensive to live with Mom and Dad than to have a place of one’s own.

But we are not so much concerned with the practical details as with the theory.

We have been told that the people who work at McDonald’s need to earn more. But what about those who write for the editorial pages? Perhaps they should earn less?

If well-educated, well-liquored, and well-paid employees can decide the wages of McDonald’s workers, surely the burger flippers should have the right to fix the wages of the chattering, meddling, and improving classes.

He goes on:

The do-gooders want to use other people’s money to raise the wages of the least well paid, but they make no mention of their own.

Nor do they even offer to pay more for their hamburgers so that McDonald’s can pay its workers more.

And what about the poor people who cannot find jobs at all?

If the minimum wage were raised, there would surely be more of them – either because McDonald’s could not afford to hire so many people at higher salaries or because it had replaced its minimum-wage employees with machines!

Rick Santorum honest but misguided on the minimum wage

On the September 16, 2015 CNN Republican Presidential debate:

Rick Santorum went full liberal Democrat moments ago. His heart is right but his policies are misplaced. 

Why should all jobs below his proposed incremental minimum wage rate hike be illegal? Why can't low-skilled workers have something to put on their resume before they get to more difficult jobs?

I understand he wants to show Americans that Republicans aren't heartless thugs, but that is not the way to do it. 

Big businesses are "fine" with Minimum wage; Mom and Pops struggle with compliance in Seattle

“The business owners are delaying new construction, suffering losses, and raising prices to comply with Seattle’s new $15 minimum wage.” ~The Bastiat Institute

Main Points

• Higher prices are the symptoms of a much bigger problem: the expansion of the money supply by the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, and the subsequent lower purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.
• The states are laboratories of democracy.
• Mainly the Democratic Party, and a few Republicans support the minimum wage. In fact, raising the minimum wage was on the Democratic Party's 2012 Platform.
• This is a traditionally “progressive” policy.
• Corporations like McDonalds and Walmart have already admitted they can cope with this policy.
• Smaller businesses however will have a much harder time coping with this, such as those in Seattle, Washington where a $15 minimum wage has been implemented and took effect this week. 

Summary

Republicans claim the minimum wage hurts businesses.

But McDonald's CEO supports the minimum wage. Why?

Because it will squeeze out the competition. The truth about the minimum wage is that it won't hurt the biggest businesses as much as it will hurt their smaller Mom-and-Pop size competitors.

In other words, "progressive" support for the minimum wage harms the "weak and the vulnerable" and benefits big corporations -- the very opposite of what they intend.

Cities, counties and states are “laboratories of democracy.” We are supposed to see what doesn’t work in this city and that city and learn from them – not turn around and advocate the same thing nationwide.

Higher costs of living are due to inflation and a declining currency. Declining currency comes from the expansion of the money supply (inflation).  Inflation comes from the Federal Reserve.

If you need any proof of the decline of the U.S. dollar, then play around with this inflation calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and see how much a dollar was worth in 1914 versus what it is now.

As an example, $100 in 1913 is $2,394.67 in 2014 money. But the opposite is true: $2,394.67 in 2014 is $100 in 1913 money. In other words, it takes a lot more of today's cash to match the purchasing power of our American ancestors.

In short, higher prices are the symptoms. The Federal Reserve’s monetary policies are the cause. We should not be going after symptoms with legislative medicine because they, like real corporate medicine, have all different kinds of harmful side effects, namely, unemployment, higher prices, and a delay in business expansion by entrepreneurs.

The people who will see this and support this idea anyway will stop us and say “no, we just wanted to slowly increase the minimum wage just a few cents or dollars more each year.” But all that really does is price out the jobs below that price floor incrementally, and delays the inevitable.

The fact that the law provides an exception to businesses with under 500 employees proves my point.

According to a CNNmoney article:

"One point of controversy prompted the International Franchise Association to threaten to sue the city within hours of the bill's passage.

Under the law, businesses with fewer than 500 workers are given more time to comply. That would be fine with the franchisees, if they were considered one of those smaller businesses.

Instead, the law states that a business owner has to count all employees in the U.S., likely putting those affiliated with a national franchisor in the large-business category."

How in the world do the people who passed this law know what time individual business owners will be able to afford the minimum wage increase?

Companies such as Walmart and McDonald’s say that they are fine with the increase. That’s because they have the structure in place to do so unlike small mom and pop shops.


Watch the wonderful explanation of this point here.

So yes, year over year legislators will have worked to bump up the minimum wage and to price out jobs below $0.50, $1.40, $4.50, $6.25, $7.25, $10.25, and $15.00.

Those kinds of jobs aren’t meant for anyone to “live” on. They’re usually reserved for teens, children, and low-skilled adults. At that age, they’re not getting paid in money alone but also in skill, responsibility and reputation.  Kids and teens could use jobs in the summertime and all year round.

Adults, on the other hand, need higher wage jobs to take care of themselves and their children. But the jobs and wages they desire are being squandered on a massive federal debt and are confiscated through taxes.

Let it be known that this is a policy that has the Democratic Party’s, including President Obama himself, and even a few Republicans’, hands on it and they should be held accountable.

Video: Bob Murphy on the Minimum Wage

Video: Walter E Williams - Minimum Wage as a Racist Tool

Walter Williams on the Racist Origins of the Davis-Bacon Act

In the context of the 2012 presidential campaign, Ron Paul should explain the racist origins of American minimum wage legislation and add a repeal of minimum wage laws to his platform since in an earlier debate he said he advocates the repeal of minimum wage laws.

The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 is a law with racist origins and broad congressional support. During the 1931 legislative debate over the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates super-minimum (mostly union) wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects, racist intents were obvious. Rep. John Cochran, D-Mo., supported the bill, saying he had "received numerous complaints … about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South." Rep. Clayton Allgood, D-Ala., complained: "Reference has been made to a contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. … That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country." Rep. William Upshaw, D-Ga., spoke of the "superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor." American Federation of Labor President William Green said, "Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates." The Davis-Bacon Act remains law. Modern rhetoric in support of it has changed, but its effects haven't. It continues to discriminate against nonunion construction labor. Most black construction workers are in the nonunion sector.

Walter Williams, Economic Fairness

Dubious Racist Origins of The Davis-Bacon Act

In 1927, Rep. Robert Bacon (R.-N.Y.)--whose pet issue was protecting America’s racial "homogeneity"--introduced what became the Davis-Bacon Act after a contractor employed African-American workers from Alabama to build a Veteran's Bureau hospital in his district. The "neighboring community," Bacon reported, was "very upset," as were local unions.

David Bernstein, Bush 'The Emancipator?'

Libertarian Views of the Law: Fair Labor Standards Act

A few weeks ago I grumbled about how congress often passes legislation that is inimical to their goals and the goals of the United States citizens. This week, I would like to take another look at another legislation which was first implemented in the 1930’s—the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Many libertarian and conservative economists often blame the minimum wage laws for increasing unemployment among low-skilled workers, including teenagers. Even Laborlawcenter.com seems to hint at it when they say that “low-skilled, youth workers stand to gain, under the assumption they are currently employed. However, for unemployed teen workers, job prospects look grim.”

As the language indicates, only people who already have jobs while the minimum wage rate increases will benefit. But what about those without jobs, what do they gain?

The rationale behind legislating the minimum wage law was that it was supposed to protect workers from being exploited by their employers. However, like any price control, there will always be a shortage of goods. In this case, those goods in shortage are the labor of low-skilled workers.

There is a patent absurdity in the minimum wage law. Are workers whose sole position is to push carts, should they be making the same minimum wage as the cook at McDonalds, or the cashier in the same store?

Clearly, different jobs require different skills. Yet the minimum wage laws treat all jobs as they are the same.

It also keeps those jobs that are worth less than the minimum wage from coming into existence. Instead of hiring low-skilled workers to do the job, employers will resort to keeping who they have on staff and have them double up on tasks—tasks that can slow them down if they weren’t relegated to another worker (this also effects customer service as well).

One may think that employers trying to find a loophole around this law by not hiring people and paying them at this price are being unfair. But what is so fair about paying people at a price their work isn't worth? This leads us to the question of the function of profits, which will be answered in a later post.

The State Against Blacks: In Honor of Black History Month

Since it is Black History Month, I thought it would be important for African Americans (and non-African Americans) to know the effects of certain economic policies designed to help Blacks and how they have inadvertently kept blacks out of work and impoverished. So much of Black Media portrays (or at least it did in the past) capitalism as an economic system of evil. However, there is no other economic system where more impoverished people accumulated wealth and prosperity, and this is despite race. Socialism, mercantilism, communism, nor any other ism has led as many people out of poverty and to prosperity.

If that is the case then why is the Black Poverty rate inching upward?

I have already argued in a previous blog that minimum wage laws don't work. I hope to revise and expand that essay more since I recently learned that those laws have even more detrimental effects than the ones I've mentioned. However, if you watch the following playlist the answer to the aforementioned question is there.

Sowell and Williams are some of the brightest men I have ever encountered, at least online. I hope to meet both of them one day, but for right now I have their books to keep me interested and informed. In the meantime, I will be watching this playlist and I hope you will too.

Happy Black History Month!



You can share this playlist by clicking the link below or copying the link below and pasting it wherever you like.

The State Against Blacks: A Youtube Playlist featuring African-American economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell

Bonus Link: What the Founding Fathers Said About Slavery?