With President Obama’s State of the Union Address and its associated campaign prominently featuring increased minimum wage, tired arguments for raising the minimum wage are being once again retreaded. Unfortunately, they compound failures of logic, measurement and evidence.

It would stimulate the economy. If I pay $1 more than necessary to hire a worker, I get $1 less in services for my money. The increase in the workers’ consumption enabled by that $1 is a transfer from me to them, not a net gain.

When Governor Isaac Stevens went around Puget Sound in the mid-1850s making treaties with the Indian tribes to clear the way for an anticipated influx of whites, he found again and again that asking for the tribal chief got him nowhere. The Indians would look around and shrug their shoulders. They had no chiefs. Like many North American Indian tribes, they made communal decisions by consensus, with at most a special influence being exerted by one or two respected elder males.

Mandatory union dues are again at issue. On the heels of contentious “right to work” disputes, the Supreme Court heard arguments challenging an Illinois mandate requiring home healthcare workers to pay representation fees to a union they did not want. Harris v. Quinn could even challenge the Court’s 1977 Aboud precedent upholding mandatory union dues for public sector workers.

After last week´s decision by HSBC to halt its policy of not honoring large withdrawal requests by depositors comes news of the Russian bank “My Bank” implementing its own run-protection measure.

From Economics in One Lesson By Henry Hazlitt

A little.    

Over at Mises Canada I explore the following unfortunate facts concerning Canadian debt:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. (Mahatma Gandhi)