As Jeff Deist pointed out in an earlier post, in a national referendum over the weekend, the Swiss heroically and overwhelmingly rejected what would have been the world’s highest minimum wage. Switzerland currently has no minimum wage.
And so is Arthur Brooks: College graduates today cannot afford to be “City Dolls”!
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls” (from Self Reliance).
Thankfully the wise Swiss recently voted 76% against an initiative to impose the highest minimum wage in the world, thus slowing momentum for a growing worldwide “living wage” movement. Note that this initiative took the form of a national referendum and a popular vote, rather than a decentralized process undertaken by individual cantons.
Hillary Clinton’s speech yesterday revealed some of her thoughts about reviving the economy.
She said she was trying to “encourage more companies to come off the sidelines and, frankly, for some to use some of that cash that is sitting there waiting to deploy.”
This echoes the naïve idea embraced by the Obama administration that economies are fueled by ever more borrowing and spending. But this is not how jobs are created.
Interviewed by host Tom Woods, Mark Thornton discusses a recent article in the Financial Times, and why its recommendations for Fed policy will benefit the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else.
Mp3, 25 minutes.
Mark Thornton discusses Martin Wolf’s recent claim that “cautious savers no longer serve a useful economic purpose.”
[Editor’s Note: In a follow-up to his remarks in the international media about the Venetian secession movement, Paolo Bernardini
Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has received lots of press and been reviewed dozens of times, so I’m not going to write a general review, but I do want to comment on his depiction of capital, contrasting it with a more Austrian approach.
Anarchists are constantly tempted to respond to their critics in a way that verges on the tu quoque fallacy — in children’s playground lingo, “it takes one to know one” — because often a critic’s claim about the horrors that anarchy would bring is essentially a claim that it would bring about a condition that already exists under the rule of states. Why the warlords would take over, the critic claims. But what are states but warlord organizations in their most developed expression? Why we’d have no protection against thieves and marauders, the critic claims.
