Justice George Sutherland photo from Wikipedia
In the part 1 and part 2 of this series I reviewed how, before the Great Depression and the New Deal, the courts largely still protected the rights of employees and employers to freely contract with regards to wages. The courts agreed that each individual was the best judge of the wages that
As I was preparing to write this week’s roundup, I realized another benefit for me in doing them. In taking notes on the key issues being discussed in each of the podcasts, I am more able to make connections and integrate what the hosts are talking about into what I already know. This integration is something we all should try to do more of, and is at times difficult. (I found I can embed the Blogtalkradio shows, so I have done that as well as link to them in the headings.)
Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave Image (c) Britanica.com
The scheduling
In part 1 of this series I introduced the Supreme Court decision from the 1923 Adkins v Children’s Hospital to illustrate the opinion of minimum wage laws that was still common prior to the Great Depression. This decision struck down a minimum wage law in the District of Columbia as
Metropolitan Hospital Infirmary Ward, 1900
Image located at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/capitalism/landmark_adkins.html
If you have spent much time reading my blog you will know that I have written quite a bit about the immorality of minimum wage laws. Such laws insert government force into what would otherwise be voluntary, mutually beneficial arrangements. Because such laws are immoral and violate the rights of both workers and employers, the results they produce are harmful to everyone, especially those they are intended to help, the young and unskilled. As I wrote in 2013:
A 2011
On October 21st Dr. Yaron Brook gave a Livestreamed talk on the Morality of Capitalism from the University of Exeter in Great Britain. As always, Yaron is passionate and informative about capitalism. If you have listened to other talks by him much of the initial talk will be familiar, though still worth watching as the formulations always vary a bit, but the Q&A section is always different because each audience brings different contexts to the conversation.
One particular question (located
One of the great things about studying history, even somewhat casually, is that you begin to see that despite what pundits may want us to believe, there is not much happening that is truly new. We often make the mistake of looking at an event taking place today and thinking that it is unprecedented, and often troubling, without realizing that, while some of the concrete examples may be different, in principle it has all happened before.
We look at such events as the recent government investment
In January Vermont legislators, including at least one Republican, introduced a bill of “economic rights” which includes provisions for raising the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour and compelling businesses to provide a minimum of 1 hour of paid personal time per 30 hours worked. The purported goal of the bill is to provide people with more money, thereby stimulating
Who would have thought that Senator Sanders (I-VT) hates young people? That is the only conclusion I can make from his recent op-ed advocating an increase to the immoral and impractical minimum wage, which will result in higher youth unemployment which in turn tends to trap them in poverty.
Man is called the rational animal, meaning his mind, his ability to think, is his sole means of survival. One only has to look around to see that everything that enables a man to live as a man required someone
Ah, the holiday shopping season is upon us and with it comes renewed outcries against Black Friday shopping and one of the statists favorite whipping boys: Wal-Mart. Mixed in with the calls to boycott Wal-Mart, obstruct entrances with protests, or vandalize their stores by replacing signage are the usual complaints about the “low wages” offered by such big retailers, citing that significant (supposedly) numbers of employees have to rely on welfare to make ends meet. Usually such
I have begun reading Burt Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America and it is interesting, as I often find it, how similar earlier times are to today.
One of the first “New Deal” measures pushed through in 1933 was the National Industrial Recovery Act, later shortened to National Recovery Act or NRA. Among the many provisions of this act was the fixing of wages, not just minimums but all wages, for each industry. This was unpopular