After scrapping the plan three years ago, Ontario Premier, Doug Ford, has decided to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour. Naturally, this move has sparked a fair amount of discussion around what the minimum wage level ought to be. Instead of taking a moment to realize the flaws in the minimum wage system, people are doubling down, calling for it to be even higher.
There is an alarming degree of uniformity between the governments of many western countries when it comes to instituting tyrannical measures like mandatory medical injections at workplaces and vaccine passports. In doing so, they have departed from liberal values and principles, by no longer recognizing or respecting private spheres, personal goals, or individual freedom and rights.
In his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith said of producers: “They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all inhabitants; and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.” As an institution of entrepreneurship, the digital marketspace is the modern version of Smith’s invisible hand: a complex phenomenon that has not been designed by a
Last month, the Labor Department reported that the CPI rose at its fastest rate since 1990: 0.9% for the month of October and has risen 6.2% since last year, beating Wall Street consensus estimates of 0.6% and 5.9% for those metrics, respectively.
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) “doesn’t fight inflation, it manufactures and maintains it.” This is a quote from the 2011 book The Evil Princes of Martin Place which I used in my first public piece on the RBA and inflation.
In my industrial organization course, I discuss the economic theory of the firm. It is important in that there are many ways real world firms don’t correspond to the way they are presented in microeconomics models. When dealing with differences between the assumptions or implications of a microeconomic model or analysis and the real world, I have often been struck by how often nirvana appears as a standard of comparison, which leads to confusion and many erroneous conclusions.
In 1833, Uriah P. Levy commissioned two statues of Thomas Jefferson.
As the first Jewish commodore in the United States Navy, Levy overcame anti-Semitism within the ranks. Levy credited his ability to serve as a religious minority to “one of the greatest men in history … [who] serves as an inspiration to millions of Americans [and] did much to mould our Republic in a form in which a man’s religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life.”
