The minimum wage on its face is an unemployment law, not an employment law. It does not compel anyone to hire anyone else. It only stipulates who CANNOT legally be employed: no one may be hired for less than the amount stipulated by law. If the minimum wage law is set at $10 per hour, the law does not require any employer to hire any employee at that wage level. It only FORBIDS employment contracts set at $9.99 or below. This is not a matter of empirical evidence, not that there can be any such thing in proper, e.g., Austrian economics; this conclusion is a matter of pure logic.

by Ira Katz

As 2014 begins I, like all sensible people, ponder how long the dollar can last, for both my personal financial decisions and as a world event of the greatest importance.

Empires can be sustained only as long as they can be economically sustained. The Soviet withdraw from Afghanistan was certainly not for any normal human or moral reason, but simply because they were going broke. In hindsight we can see that the days of that evil empire were numbered with that strategic military retreat.

by Chris Rossini

Hjalmar Schacht was Hitler’s economic guy. According to Wikipedia, Schacht: ”became a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and served in Hitler’s government as President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. As such, Schacht played a key role in implementing the policies attributed to Hitler.”

Now, we all know what happened to Hitler. But what about Schacht?

On June 9, 1947 Henry Hazlitt would write in Newsweek:

Writes Robert Blumen:

Ron Paul reacts: See the video here

Here’s an article on the topic.

President Obama has recently promoted inequality as a fundamental threat to our way of life, saying, “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe.” You can read the rhetoric here. Let’s look at the reality.

I was recommended to watch a 30-minute video by Bridgewater Associates available at EconomicPrinciples.org explaining How the Economic Machine Works. The phrasing “economic machine” should be enough to raise the blood pressure of anyone with the slightest economic literacy. And sure enough, while there are some truths in the video, it is a masterpiece in no-says and well disguised fallacies.

The idea that some goods are “public” has been paraded around for at least 60 years as a justification for state involvement in certain affairs. The idea that some goods are non-excludable (you cannot stop someone from enjoying them), but also non-rivalrous (why would you exclude anyone because one person enjoying the good does not detract from another’s enjoyment) is now the common argument for all sorts of government activities from fireworks to national defense and everything in between.

Mortgage Lending is down more than 50% at the big banks from the 1st to 4th quarter. Higher interest rates on mortgages is leading to less refinances and fewer home purchases. But Market Watch reports that things are not all bad: