So, let me understand this: the rich are getting richer AND the poor are getting richer, but the lower waged earnings are rising, yet way, way slower than the upper wage grades. So it's like two cars on a road, one slow one fast, they're both making progress, but the gap between them expands, so giving the ILLUSION the of getting poorer (I'm excluding inflation here), if we simply focus on the gap between them, if you get my drift.
This may sound good in theory but price ceilings are needed if industry increases prices with no economic foundation. For example, the price increases in oil up to the '08 crash. It seems that the oil markets/rogue speculators can increase prices with any pathetic excuse in the book, and this is when supply/demand are stable. In cases like this, a price ceiling will put a stop to it.
@Gatedialer The main difference between the 1970s versus pre-2008 crash is that 1970s we had a legitimate supply/demand issue whereas the pre-2008 crash saw oil price increases unecessarily when supply/demand are stable
There are no unintended consequences in economics because government policy intends to create the mess we are in so they can come along and take over the economy in order to "rescue" us.
The logical fallacies in this video prevent it from being a serious discussion. The prof. has some interesting data but connects it in ways that are poorly supported. Not all things are scarce, like ideas or wealth. There is more wealth in the US today than has ever existed in history if one measures wealth by unsecured treasury notes and empty assets we "call" wealth in this country. It's not scarce, it's merely concentrated in the hands of 2% of the population. That's not judgment, just fact.
The profs arguments all rest on the fallacy of free markets that don't actually exist. Monopolies, tax breaks for special interests, government regulation (both good and bad), financial fraud, corporate crime, collusion, etc... will always hinder free markets. In the face of that, progressive policies like minimum wage laws and worker safety laws make sense. It's not a perfect solution, but until we recognize the myth of the free markets, it's the only balance we have to apply.
@PhilosphyBeast " Monopolies, tax breaks for special interests, govt. regulation (good & bad), financial fraud, corporate crime, collusion, etc." Indeed, as you have shown, that is not a free market. The question remains, why would price fixing remedy oligopolies & monopolies, particularly as price fixing is a key feature of oligopolies and monopolies? The more firms there are to choose from in a market, the wider the variance in price/quality and the freer it it tends to become.
Less profit permitted which means fewer of those goods are produced.
Lower price means more people rush to buy the fewer goods. The result?
Instant shortage.
This applies to anything from rent control to health insurance, to oil, to electricity, you name it. You cannot make things more affordable through policies that discourage the creation of new wealth in the first place.
It is an illusion to think that the Government can remove ALL risk in this real world! Banks and individuals still need to make GOOD economic decisions, based on real possible risk! This is normal; this is good. Then REAL success and good decisions can be recognized! This professor is so good! Thanks for posting
@cyrus79100 It doesn't have much of an effect on total unemployment, but it does tend to raise unemployment on the lowest-skilled, youngest, and least-educated workers.
Not only has this been consistently verified, it seems self-evident when you consider the exceptions to the federal and state minimum wages, e.g. the lower alternative minimum wage for teenagers. If there had been no impact on unemployment, those exceptions probably wouldn't exist.
Lift the minimum wages policy, remove all social safety nets and use capital punishment on all kinds of crime, then the unemployment issue could be solved overnight.
I'd like to see the years 2008s and after. And what defines a 'household'? Does it mean a family? I bet the number of families in the U.S. are starting to decline.
I agree with all of that, except that his analysis of the "rich get richer, the poor get poorer" is flawed. It would be more apt to look at not numbers of people that make more, but rather how much they actually make, i.e., to compare the bottom 2% income to the top 2% income. Furthermore, you should get rid of technological advancement. No matter what the poor will be better off in the future, but that is a meaningless statement when determining what policies will benefit them most.
I would still like to see the final graph with one change: individual income adjusted for inflation rather than household income adjusted for inflation. The reason being that SOME of the reason could be because more households now have two income sources than before. If the graph still holds it's shape, then people are both making more money individually and collectively.
@avatarius1000 According to whom? Every study I've seen says the opposite. Last I checked less than 7% of households consisted of a married couple where only one spouse earned an income. Nearly half had dual income, and the rest were of some other makeup. (Likely single/divorced parents and individuals with no children.)
I think this is a rather simplistic view on minimum wage. You have to look even further back, pre WW1 and even pre 20th century and look on the wage development in a free market, did they increase over time? Is there an abundance in the work force? Are there more jobs than workers? Or the other way around? How is the complementary institutions? Can a low skilled worker get cheap education? Are there programs for internships? How does it look in other countries? Europe, Asia? What types of jobs?
It is now relatively well established that what damages society is the gap between the rich and the poor not their individual growth rates in income. People interested in an easy critique of this free market falacy should read The Spirit Level.
@joeomahoney why is a gap between rich and poor inherently damaging to society? In developed countries, the gap (in nominal monetary terms) is the widest, and yet the poorest citizens enjoy a standard of living that would be the envy of countries with less of an income gap. North Korea has a much smaller income gap than the U.S., and they live a near-medieval existence. Surely you wouldn't claim that North Korean society is healthier than American society, would you?
@gergenheimer. Obviously there are always outliers! My grandmother smoked twenty a day and lived to 400 etc.... Income inequality is causally correlated to a number of negative outcomes not only for the poor and the average person, but incredibly also for the rich. The Spirit Level is an excellent statistical demonstration of this that is well worth a read and not simplistic in the way many books can be.
@joeomahoney North Korea isn't an outlier, there are dozens more examples - Cuba, India, China, the former USSR, the eastern bloc countries, all of Africa, Central America, Haiti, etc.. In these places, where income inequality is less, standards of living are worse in every measurable way - shelter, food, clothing, life expectancy, education, leisure time, working conditions, on and on. I just read a synopsis of the claims made in "The Spirit Level", and - sorry, but they're factually incorrect.
yeah those countries like China have dollar pegs.. you jus waint untill they depeg from the dollar they will have a higher standard of lving than we do.. They produce everything..
@gergenheimer I agree with your main point, but there are huge differences between the countries you mention. While Cuba, the former USSR, et al. do tend to have both lower income inequality and much lower standards of living, many of the others have relatively enormous income inequality.
Additionally, the levels of income inequality vary greatly among countries in Africa and Central America. It's true that all of them have low standards of living in comparison to the US, however.
This is why economists should stay away from government policy. This is a simplistic analysis with incorrect conclusions drawn from shaky data. The data intervals have been very selectively chosen and the correlations are no necessarily causal. The vast majority of data show that the very poor have got slightly poorer and the very rich have gotten massively richer. More importantly, the minimum wage is about 'signalling' the dignity and respect of work: all value is not monetary.....
@joeomahoney: No, it is why politicians should stay away from the economy. This relationship holds across time, across countries, between countries, and is exactly what economic theory predicts. What the min wage signals is a lack of respect for the individual. One of its first uses was in apartheid South Africa where the government stated that the purpose of the min wage was to prevent lower skilled black workers from competing with white workers by pricing the blacks out of the market.
@anonymoususerguy: There is a certain irony to claiming that "politicians should stay away from the economy" at a time when the government bail-outs of poorly regulated banks saved us from heading into a depression. It is no coincidence that the most free-market economies (US&UK) no have growing unemployment, debt and inequality whilst those employing social forms of capitalism (N. Europe) are doing very well.
@joeomahoney: The origin of the financial meltdown was the US government deciding that everyone should own a home and then creating government-backed entities to remove mortgage risk from the market. The market responded as expected. If the government had stayed out of the economy originally, people wouldn't be calling for the government to enter the market to fix a problem that wouldn't otherwise have existed.
Gorverment bailouts did not save us from a depression.. They guaranteed it.. The reason we are in trouble is because of Goverment and federal reserve policy doing pricesly what you just said in the name of "saving us".. The reason banks failed is becaues of goverment guaranteed loans/bailouts that took all the risk away. You have no understanding of our monetary system, you are a typical Marxist,coumminsts "unregulated capitalism" is the probel dope that the goverment loves...
Gorverment bailouts did not save us from a depression.. They guaranteed it.. The reason we are in trouble is because of Goverment and federal reserve policy doing pricesly what you just said in the name of "saving us".. The reason banks failed is becaues of goverment guaranteed loans/bailouts that took all the risk away. You have no understanding of our monetary system, you are a typical Marxist,coumminsts ' unregulated capitalism" is the problem dupe.
@xMaXiMuSx Aw, bless. I'd love to answer, but I'm guessing if you can't spell 'communist' or 'precisely', this may not be the most fruitful use of my time. I'm guessing you're pretty young, which is no bad thing, but as you grow, please read enough history to know that (a) the collapse preceded the guarantees, and (b) the dangers of unregulated capitalism are now universally accepted, even by neo-classical economists.
@joeomahoney I think you're focusing on the wrong issue. I believe Walter Block's video states the problem more clearly, which is that the minimum wage is essentially a hurdle over which one must jump to get a job. This disproportionally harms people whose skill level is least desirable in the market.
People whose labor is valued at less than the minimum can't find a job at all. Even worse, this keeps them from developing skills which could lead to greater employment opportunities.
@tasteslikechimp The 'wrong point' as you put it, is an ethical point. Obviously a minimum wage damages employment. The ethical question is 'what minimum standard of living should rich nations provide to their poorest citizens?'. The logical consequence of the neo-classical answer has no lowest point (starvation, slavery?), the logical consequence of a social democracy is one where the nation is prepared for slightly higher unemployment in exchange for not treating its citizens like dogs.
@joeomahoney Yes, but minimum wages are an ineffective way to address the issue. If we want to improve the position of the poorest members of society through government action, we should avoid any measure that reduces the opportunity to acquire skills through employment.
The same income effect could be produced through negative income taxes or other transfer payments without necessarily raising unemployment. The deadweight loss would spill over into other areas, however.
@joeomahoney Also, the notion of "slightly higher" unemployment is a misnomer. It's true for society at large--since most people earn more than the minimum wage already, it's not a binding price floor for them. The raised unemployment affects only those people who could find jobs below the minimum wage, but not at the minimum wage. The direct harm is concentrated on the people the policy is meant to help.
@tasteslikechimp "Also, the notion of "slightly higher" unemployment is a misnomer. It's true for society at large--since most people earn more than the minimum wage already, it's not a binding price floor for them."
No, your argument isn't valid. Saying "...since most people earn more than the minimum wage" doesn't affirm the claim "slightly higher unemployment is a misnomer". That's flawed logic. To be more precise, you committed the fallacy of rationalization.
@DOHC2L Perhaps "improper aggregation" is a better term than "misnomer," but the point remains. By reductio ad absurdum, the minimum wage in South Dakota has a negligible effect because it doesn't raise measured unemployment in North America. The impact on total unemployment is a necessary, but not a sufficient, analysis. Taken by itself, is is simply the fallacy of division.
@tasteslikechimp "Perhaps "improper aggregation" is a better term than "misnomer," but the point remains."
It's an inductive type argument. Think critically - the fallacy is caused by assuming a conclusion to be true and therefore 'rationalizes' the assumption. Invalid assumptions are hard to perceive because the (errant) conclusion includes valid claims about reality, but which-for are valid for different reasons than you've alluded to. Trust me I'm a logician & economist.
@DOHC2L I believe you took the first part of my claim out of context. My point was that when a policy has a large impact on a small part of society but little impact on everybody else, it is misleading to look only at society in general for the effects of the policy. A meaningful study must also examine the part of society that bears the greatest impact. Perhaps there is an error in my reasoning or I'm being unclear, but you seem to be making a semantic distinction unrelated to my point.
Any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention the mobility between income levels is incomplete. The "poor" are not a constant sub-class. Those new to the work force with low skills are today's poor but by accumulating work experience they do not stay poor.
@DrTodd13 Prof. Horwitz addresses that very issue in the video on our channel called: "Are the Poor Getting Poorer?" You should check it out and let us know what you think. youtube.com/watch?v=vDhcqua3_W8
So, let me understand this: the rich are getting richer AND the poor are getting richer, but the lower waged earnings are rising, yet way, way slower than the upper wage grades. So it's like two cars on a road, one slow one fast, they're both making progress, but the gap between them expands, so giving the ILLUSION the of getting poorer (I'm excluding inflation here), if we simply focus on the gap between them, if you get my drift.
jontycampbell 1 week ago
I'm sorry but this just makes too much sense
redcups21 1 month ago
This may sound good in theory but price ceilings are needed if industry increases prices with no economic foundation. For example, the price increases in oil up to the '08 crash. It seems that the oil markets/rogue speculators can increase prices with any pathetic excuse in the book, and this is when supply/demand are stable. In cases like this, a price ceiling will put a stop to it.
jackiechan511 1 month ago in playlist More videos from LearnLiberty
@jackiechan511 Like in the 1970s, when there were price controls on gasoline. That worked out really fucking well, huh?
Gatedialer 1 month ago
@Gatedialer The main difference between the 1970s versus pre-2008 crash is that 1970s we had a legitimate supply/demand issue whereas the pre-2008 crash saw oil price increases unecessarily when supply/demand are stable
jackiechan511 1 month ago
There are no unintended consequences in economics because government policy intends to create the mess we are in so they can come along and take over the economy in order to "rescue" us.
thschear 2 months ago
The logical fallacies in this video prevent it from being a serious discussion. The prof. has some interesting data but connects it in ways that are poorly supported. Not all things are scarce, like ideas or wealth. There is more wealth in the US today than has ever existed in history if one measures wealth by unsecured treasury notes and empty assets we "call" wealth in this country. It's not scarce, it's merely concentrated in the hands of 2% of the population. That's not judgment, just fact.
PhilosphyBeast 2 months ago
@PhilosphyBeast
The profs arguments all rest on the fallacy of free markets that don't actually exist. Monopolies, tax breaks for special interests, government regulation (both good and bad), financial fraud, corporate crime, collusion, etc... will always hinder free markets. In the face of that, progressive policies like minimum wage laws and worker safety laws make sense. It's not a perfect solution, but until we recognize the myth of the free markets, it's the only balance we have to apply.
PhilosphyBeast 2 months ago
@PhilosphyBeast " Monopolies, tax breaks for special interests, govt. regulation (good & bad), financial fraud, corporate crime, collusion, etc." Indeed, as you have shown, that is not a free market. The question remains, why would price fixing remedy oligopolies & monopolies, particularly as price fixing is a key feature of oligopolies and monopolies? The more firms there are to choose from in a market, the wider the variance in price/quality and the freer it it tends to become.
jontycampbell 1 week ago
Comment removed
tasteslikechimp 2 months ago
Price caps in a nutshell:
Less profit permitted which means fewer of those goods are produced.
Lower price means more people rush to buy the fewer goods. The result?
Instant shortage.
This applies to anything from rent control to health insurance, to oil, to electricity, you name it. You cannot make things more affordable through policies that discourage the creation of new wealth in the first place.
StateExempt 4 months ago
It is an illusion to think that the Government can remove ALL risk in this real world! Banks and individuals still need to make GOOD economic decisions, based on real possible risk! This is normal; this is good. Then REAL success and good decisions can be recognized! This professor is so good! Thanks for posting
AmericaTops 5 months ago
raising the minimum wage has no effect on unemployment. it's been proven. this is a self serving lie.
cyrus79100 5 months ago
@cyrus79100 It doesn't have much of an effect on total unemployment, but it does tend to raise unemployment on the lowest-skilled, youngest, and least-educated workers.
Not only has this been consistently verified, it seems self-evident when you consider the exceptions to the federal and state minimum wages, e.g. the lower alternative minimum wage for teenagers. If there had been no impact on unemployment, those exceptions probably wouldn't exist.
tasteslikechimp 2 months ago
Lift the minimum wages policy, remove all social safety nets and use capital punishment on all kinds of crime, then the unemployment issue could be solved overnight.
stephentsang2000 6 months ago
I'd like to see the years 2008s and after. And what defines a 'household'? Does it mean a family? I bet the number of families in the U.S. are starting to decline.
theblackout27 6 months ago
I agree with all of that, except that his analysis of the "rich get richer, the poor get poorer" is flawed. It would be more apt to look at not numbers of people that make more, but rather how much they actually make, i.e., to compare the bottom 2% income to the top 2% income. Furthermore, you should get rid of technological advancement. No matter what the poor will be better off in the future, but that is a meaningless statement when determining what policies will benefit them most.
Keeban3 7 months ago
One of the quickest and easiest things we could do to increase employment would be to nullify the minimum wage.
adulby 8 months ago 7
I would still like to see the final graph with one change: individual income adjusted for inflation rather than household income adjusted for inflation. The reason being that SOME of the reason could be because more households now have two income sources than before. If the graph still holds it's shape, then people are both making more money individually and collectively.
vedinthorn 8 months ago
@vedinthorn Actually, the amount of homes with dual income have dropped over the last 50 years.
avatarius1000 8 months ago
@avatarius1000 According to whom? Every study I've seen says the opposite. Last I checked less than 7% of households consisted of a married couple where only one spouse earned an income. Nearly half had dual income, and the rest were of some other makeup. (Likely single/divorced parents and individuals with no children.)
vedinthorn 8 months ago
I think this is a rather simplistic view on minimum wage. You have to look even further back, pre WW1 and even pre 20th century and look on the wage development in a free market, did they increase over time? Is there an abundance in the work force? Are there more jobs than workers? Or the other way around? How is the complementary institutions? Can a low skilled worker get cheap education? Are there programs for internships? How does it look in other countries? Europe, Asia? What types of jobs?
danneland 9 months ago
It is now relatively well established that what damages society is the gap between the rich and the poor not their individual growth rates in income. People interested in an easy critique of this free market falacy should read The Spirit Level.
joeomahoney 9 months ago
@joeomahoney why is a gap between rich and poor inherently damaging to society? In developed countries, the gap (in nominal monetary terms) is the widest, and yet the poorest citizens enjoy a standard of living that would be the envy of countries with less of an income gap. North Korea has a much smaller income gap than the U.S., and they live a near-medieval existence. Surely you wouldn't claim that North Korean society is healthier than American society, would you?
gergenheimer 9 months ago
@gergenheimer. Obviously there are always outliers! My grandmother smoked twenty a day and lived to 400 etc.... Income inequality is causally correlated to a number of negative outcomes not only for the poor and the average person, but incredibly also for the rich. The Spirit Level is an excellent statistical demonstration of this that is well worth a read and not simplistic in the way many books can be.
joeomahoney 9 months ago
@joeomahoney North Korea isn't an outlier, there are dozens more examples - Cuba, India, China, the former USSR, the eastern bloc countries, all of Africa, Central America, Haiti, etc.. In these places, where income inequality is less, standards of living are worse in every measurable way - shelter, food, clothing, life expectancy, education, leisure time, working conditions, on and on. I just read a synopsis of the claims made in "The Spirit Level", and - sorry, but they're factually incorrect.
gergenheimer 9 months ago
@gergenheimer
yeah those countries like China have dollar pegs.. you jus waint untill they depeg from the dollar they will have a higher standard of lving than we do.. They produce everything..
xMaXiMuSx 5 months ago
@gergenheimer I agree with your main point, but there are huge differences between the countries you mention. While Cuba, the former USSR, et al. do tend to have both lower income inequality and much lower standards of living, many of the others have relatively enormous income inequality.
Additionally, the levels of income inequality vary greatly among countries in Africa and Central America. It's true that all of them have low standards of living in comparison to the US, however.
tasteslikechimp 2 months ago
This is why economists should stay away from government policy. This is a simplistic analysis with incorrect conclusions drawn from shaky data. The data intervals have been very selectively chosen and the correlations are no necessarily causal. The vast majority of data show that the very poor have got slightly poorer and the very rich have gotten massively richer. More importantly, the minimum wage is about 'signalling' the dignity and respect of work: all value is not monetary.....
joeomahoney 9 months ago
@joeomahoney: No, it is why politicians should stay away from the economy. This relationship holds across time, across countries, between countries, and is exactly what economic theory predicts. What the min wage signals is a lack of respect for the individual. One of its first uses was in apartheid South Africa where the government stated that the purpose of the min wage was to prevent lower skilled black workers from competing with white workers by pricing the blacks out of the market.
anonymoususerguy 9 months ago
@anonymoususerguy: There is a certain irony to claiming that "politicians should stay away from the economy" at a time when the government bail-outs of poorly regulated banks saved us from heading into a depression. It is no coincidence that the most free-market economies (US&UK) no have growing unemployment, debt and inequality whilst those employing social forms of capitalism (N. Europe) are doing very well.
joeomahoney 9 months ago
@joeomahoney: The origin of the financial meltdown was the US government deciding that everyone should own a home and then creating government-backed entities to remove mortgage risk from the market. The market responded as expected. If the government had stayed out of the economy originally, people wouldn't be calling for the government to enter the market to fix a problem that wouldn't otherwise have existed.
anonymoususerguy 9 months ago 2
@joeomahoney
Gorverment bailouts did not save us from a depression.. They guaranteed it.. The reason we are in trouble is because of Goverment and federal reserve policy doing pricesly what you just said in the name of "saving us".. The reason banks failed is becaues of goverment guaranteed loans/bailouts that took all the risk away. You have no understanding of our monetary system, you are a typical Marxist,coumminsts "unregulated capitalism" is the probel dope that the goverment loves...
xMaXiMuSx 5 months ago
@joeomahoney
Gorverment bailouts did not save us from a depression.. They guaranteed it.. The reason we are in trouble is because of Goverment and federal reserve policy doing pricesly what you just said in the name of "saving us".. The reason banks failed is becaues of goverment guaranteed loans/bailouts that took all the risk away. You have no understanding of our monetary system, you are a typical Marxist,coumminsts ' unregulated capitalism" is the problem dupe.
xMaXiMuSx 5 months ago
@xMaXiMuSx Aw, bless. I'd love to answer, but I'm guessing if you can't spell 'communist' or 'precisely', this may not be the most fruitful use of my time. I'm guessing you're pretty young, which is no bad thing, but as you grow, please read enough history to know that (a) the collapse preceded the guarantees, and (b) the dangers of unregulated capitalism are now universally accepted, even by neo-classical economists.
joeomahoney 2 months ago
@joeomahoney I think you're focusing on the wrong issue. I believe Walter Block's video states the problem more clearly, which is that the minimum wage is essentially a hurdle over which one must jump to get a job. This disproportionally harms people whose skill level is least desirable in the market.
People whose labor is valued at less than the minimum can't find a job at all. Even worse, this keeps them from developing skills which could lead to greater employment opportunities.
tasteslikechimp 2 months ago
@tasteslikechimp The 'wrong point' as you put it, is an ethical point. Obviously a minimum wage damages employment. The ethical question is 'what minimum standard of living should rich nations provide to their poorest citizens?'. The logical consequence of the neo-classical answer has no lowest point (starvation, slavery?), the logical consequence of a social democracy is one where the nation is prepared for slightly higher unemployment in exchange for not treating its citizens like dogs.
joeomahoney 2 months ago
@joeomahoney Yes, but minimum wages are an ineffective way to address the issue. If we want to improve the position of the poorest members of society through government action, we should avoid any measure that reduces the opportunity to acquire skills through employment.
The same income effect could be produced through negative income taxes or other transfer payments without necessarily raising unemployment. The deadweight loss would spill over into other areas, however.
tasteslikechimp 2 months ago
@joeomahoney Also, the notion of "slightly higher" unemployment is a misnomer. It's true for society at large--since most people earn more than the minimum wage already, it's not a binding price floor for them. The raised unemployment affects only those people who could find jobs below the minimum wage, but not at the minimum wage. The direct harm is concentrated on the people the policy is meant to help.
tasteslikechimp 2 months ago
@tasteslikechimp Both good point, thanks for making them. Gives me something to think about..... will do some more reading on the topic!
All the best, Joe.
joeomahoney 2 months ago
@tasteslikechimp *points
joeomahoney 2 months ago
@tasteslikechimp "Also, the notion of "slightly higher" unemployment is a misnomer. It's true for society at large--since most people earn more than the minimum wage already, it's not a binding price floor for them."
No, your argument isn't valid. Saying "...since most people earn more than the minimum wage" doesn't affirm the claim "slightly higher unemployment is a misnomer". That's flawed logic. To be more precise, you committed the fallacy of rationalization.
DOHC2L 2 months ago
@DOHC2L Perhaps "improper aggregation" is a better term than "misnomer," but the point remains. By reductio ad absurdum, the minimum wage in South Dakota has a negligible effect because it doesn't raise measured unemployment in North America. The impact on total unemployment is a necessary, but not a sufficient, analysis. Taken by itself, is is simply the fallacy of division.
tasteslikechimp 2 months ago
@tasteslikechimp "Perhaps "improper aggregation" is a better term than "misnomer," but the point remains."
It's an inductive type argument. Think critically - the fallacy is caused by assuming a conclusion to be true and therefore 'rationalizes' the assumption. Invalid assumptions are hard to perceive because the (errant) conclusion includes valid claims about reality, but which-for are valid for different reasons than you've alluded to. Trust me I'm a logician & economist.
DOHC2L 2 months ago
@DOHC2L I believe you took the first part of my claim out of context. My point was that when a policy has a large impact on a small part of society but little impact on everybody else, it is misleading to look only at society in general for the effects of the policy. A meaningful study must also examine the part of society that bears the greatest impact. Perhaps there is an error in my reasoning or I'm being unclear, but you seem to be making a semantic distinction unrelated to my point.
tasteslikechimp 2 months ago
It's ironic that almost all the advocates of minimum wage are politicians who started off as unpaid interns.
Some as lawyers, politicians, stock brokers - all of which start off at $0.
LibertyDownUnder 9 months ago 20
Any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention the mobility between income levels is incomplete. The "poor" are not a constant sub-class. Those new to the work force with low skills are today's poor but by accumulating work experience they do not stay poor.
DrTodd13 9 months ago 5
@DrTodd13 Prof. Horwitz addresses that very issue in the video on our channel called: "Are the Poor Getting Poorer?" You should check it out and let us know what you think. youtube.com/watch?v=vDhcqua3_W8
LearnLiberty 9 months ago 8
Wow, more knowledge in 5 mins. than most 5 hour seminars supply....
niklasbastholmhansen 9 months ago 24