There are labor shortages all over the country. There are not enough truck drivers, plumbers, food waitresses, construction workers, and so on. The official unemployment rate is below 4 percent. It was just reported private sector wages popped 2.9 percent.
However, Bernie Sanders and other “progressive” candidates are endorsing the idea of a federal living wage. On his website, Bernie starts with,
You might not particularly care if the Senate confirms Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court or not, but we should care very much about the spectacle playing out in the press and social media. The overall effect is to remind us of Washington DC’s status as the center of the universe, how Supreme Court justices necessarily and justifiably wield tremendous power over our lives, and why we should feverishly vote this fall to make sure the bad guys don’t win and inflict their judges on us for the next fifty years.
As discussed previously, gun-control regulation has a track record of facilitating repressive political regimes.
On August 31, President Donald J. Trump signed the Executive Order on Strengthening Retirement Security in America, a preliminary step in allowing seniors more economic freedom and security in retirement. At present, there are many constrictive regulations in place preventing Americans from saving as much money as they otherwise would.
According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos survey, 70 percent of Americans, including about 50 percent of Republicans, support Medicare for all, the latest incarnation of single-payer health care. Republican support for a health plan labeled “Medicare for all” is not surprising considering that Republican politicians support Medicare and that one of their attacks on Obamacare was that it would harm the program. Furthermore, the biggest expansion of Medicare since its creation — the Part D prescription drug program — occurred under a conservative president working with a conservative Congress.
I have known Guido a long time, and when he was working on the book, I used to goad him by asking frequently, “When are you going to finish that Mises book?” I had no idea what a tremendous project that research was or what magnificent fruit it would bear. After reading it, I wrote to Guido as follows:
Only for a short while did the collapse of the Soviet Union silence Marxism. The fatal attraction of the thoughts of Karl Marx has returned — not because they are right but because they are wrong. Marxism serves to convert resentment into a social problem. Marxism is attractive because this ideology offers a huge arsenal of bile to fire up personal ire and to transform wrath into a political agenda.
[Advocates for tariffs and trade controls often claim that tariffs are good “for everyone” because they ultimately lead to more production and wealth creation for everyone in the economy. In Chapter 2 of Theory and History, Ludwig von Mises notes that interventionist policies designed to benefit a certain interest group (e.g., tariffs) fail to obtain the goals claimed, and thus are not good “for everyone” after all. -Ed.]
Democratic governments, almost all of them, are normally run by career pols. They have ravenous appetites for wealth. They almost always have big plans to expand the government, which means they always want more money. (I remember Hillary Clinton’s recent book, What Happened. Here she spoke about her plans for a presidency and said she likes “to think big”.) Most popular governments, faced with money problems, will usually pretend they’re only after the wealth of the rich, but it is the great middle class that is bloodied.
Why?
