The Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 4 (1990)

Let’s not kid ourselves: the so-called party of free markets and business supports minimum wage hikes, at least when put to a vote. Ramesh Ponnuru reminds us how GOP Senators voted on the issue back in 2007, and even offers a different approach for conservatives seeking to win the hearts and minds of working-class voters: forget wages, just subsidize low-income folks directly by expanding Nixon’s brainchild, the earned income tax credit.

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.

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