California is on the verge of increasing the statewide minimum wage to $15, from $10. The plan involves incremental steps up to $15 per hour by 2022. According to one pro-minimum wage policy advisor, “It would mean a raise for one of every three workers in the state.”
A heroin epidemic has been spreading across the United States, expanding enormously for the last several years. With it, the number of people dying has also increased dramatically. While politicians offer failed solutions like “securing the borders,” the real solution is to legalize drugs.
It was not long after last week’s horrifying bombings in Brussels that the so-called security experts were out warning that Europeans must give up more of their liberty so government can keep them secure from terrorism. I guess people are not supposed to notice that every terrorist attack represents a major government failure and that rewarding failure with more of the same policies only invites more failure.
Ours is truly an Age of Statistics. In a country and an era that worships statistical data as super “scientific,” as offering us the keys to all knowledge, a vast supply of data of all shapes and sizes pours forth upon us. Mostly, it pours forth from government. While private agencies and trade associations do gather and issue some statistics, they are limited to specific wants of specific industries. The vast bulk of statistics is gathered and disseminated by government.
Terrorism gripped the headlines again this week as terrorists struck the airport and metro station in Brussels, Belgium. Naturally, as Jeff Deist points out, this massive failure in government security will lead to calls for more government funding, and more control over the lives of citizens.
In response to recent claims by the Obama administration and others that “millions of jobs” have recently been created, I examined the data here at mises.org to see if the claims were true. It turns out that job growth since the 2008 recession has actually been quite weak, and hardly something to boast about.
Nevertheless, our conclusions from these analyses tend to rest on the idea that job growth is synonymous with gains in wealth and economic prosperity.
But is that a good assumption?
Tibor Machan passed away yesterday, a few days after his 77th birthday. It is hard to believe that Tibor is no longer with us, as he was a man of indefatigable energy. He was an ardent defender of libertarianism; and in a vast number of publications, he showed a rare ability to apply philosophical principles to contemporary issues. In Individuals and Their Rights and many other books and articles, he defended a version of ethical egoism that developed in his own way ideas from Aristotle and Ayn Rand.
The budget crisis in Louisiana is so bad that it apparently threatens the upcoming college football season. This is according to the state’s new Democratic governor John Bel Edwards. The current yearly budget deficit has reached $940 million. The situation is so dire that higher education in the state faces the realistic possibility of running out of money and taking college sports with it.
The nullification of federal drug laws by Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska has for years been flipping the usual narrative on political parties in the United States.
“Local control” has long been regarded as the domain of right wingers, but ever since the movement to legalize marijuana at the state level using statewide plebiscites has gotten traction, the Obama administration has decided to look the other way in the face of local opposition to federal law.
