Who would question the need for the state to provide and enforce law? Bruce Benson, that’s who. A professor of economics at Florida State University, this is Benson’s blockbuster, pioneering treatise, the one that broke open a completely new field of study and forced the rethinking of this entire sector: The Enterprise of Law.
This story is a little older but it shows the path down which Chicago is going. It is quite saddening to see our cities becoming increasingly regulatory and Fascistic. In this article, Fran Spielman writes about the incredible drive one alderman has to ban fatty foods from the streets of Chicago. This comes after a report listing Chicago as the one of the most obese cities in the United States. The alderman is attacking one specific type of fat, Trans-fatty acids.
Chicago now has this great new law:
The measure requires retailers with more than $1 billion in annual sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet to pay workers at least $10 an hour in wages plus $3 an hour in fringe benefits by mid-2010.
Does this mean a 16 year old kid must be paid 10 bucks per hour plus benefits from day one? Possibly, although I haven’t seen the law. Naturally, this will drive discount stores out the area, making poor people the big losers.
I just found this, and it’s marvelous!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As soon as I could safely toddle
My parents handed me a Model;
My brisk and energetic pater
Provided the accelerator.
My mother, with her kindly gumption,
The function guiding my consumption;
And every week I had from her
A lovely new parameter,
With lots of little leads and lags
In pretty parabolic bags.
Reading Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright’s Culture and Enterprise, I was struck by the following percipient and eloquent observation by Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien (c.145-86 BC), over two thousand years ago, regarding the coordinating capacity of the market process:
I remember when I was at Walter Block’s excellent Radical Austrianism, Radical Libertarianism seminar last summer, someone asked him if being an Austrian led people to become libertarians. Specifically, they were wondering how someone could not adopt libertarian views on something like the minimum wage once they understood the actual economic effects of it. Dr. Block’s reply was to the effect that he supposed you could be a rather unpleasant person, and support the minimum wage because you thought it was good for certain groups of people to be unemployed.
