Labor and Wages

Jeff and Bob discuss the dynamics of the housing market in the context of a recent talk by Alex Pollock.

Opponents of markets claim that worker wages have not kept up with worker productivity. This incorrect claim is based on two mistakes in estimating wages. 

Workers should have the freedom to take their time off when they need it most. Official government holidays don't actually mean more time off. They just mean less flexibility.

In real life, the labor market includes government employers. So the fundamental question is whether or not a laborer can morally seek out the highest wage offered by all employers.

The United States’s jobs recovery is extremely poor, especially if we consider the size of the monetary and fiscal stimulus and the spectacular upgrade to GDP estimates.

We often hear these minimum wage laws are well intentioned. I cannot agree. Minimum-wage laws are evil in their methods (coercion) and evil in their goals (to make people believe they’re dependent on government). 

The United States’s jobs recovery is extremely poor, especially if we consider the size of the monetary and fiscal stimulus and the spectacular upgrade to GDP estimates.

In Keynes's day, wages were being artificially inflated by labor union contracts. Unemployment rose. But then Keynes decided inflation would solve the problem by lowering real wages. Here's why that's a bad idea. 

Henry Hazlitt’s second law is the observation that everything in Keynes's General Theory is either unoriginal or untrue. Keynes's theory of unemployment equilibrium is the most original aspect of his work. 

The automation doomers assume that when jobs are eliminated by automation in one place, that the number of jobs are permanently gone. For this to be true, there would have to be no growth in the need for labor elsewhere.