Free Republic

Conservative presidential candidate Ben Carson says the $7.25 federal minimum wage should be raised. “I think, probably, it should be higher than now,” Carson told CNBC’s John Harwood in an interview Friday. Carson added that government assistance often provides more than the minimum wage in several states, allowing people to ignore the long-term benefits of a job.

Britain deserves a pay rise, David Cameron said last night. The Prime Minister said it was time for workers squeezed by years of austerity to get their reward. It came as official statistics showed falling oil prices and the economic recovery have pushed firms’ profitability to a 16-year high.Tory strategists hope an economic feel-good factor, buoyed by jobs growth and low inflation, will translate into stronger wage rises by May’s general election. Asked whether he would encourage firms to pass on windfall profits from falling oil prices to employees, Mr. Cameron, in Washington for talks with Barack Obama, said: “Obviously...

The U.S. "market" economy took another hard-to-believe turn this week with the Obama Treasury appointing a "compensation czar" to dictate wage controls on private companies that take taxpayer money and offer guidelines for every other U.S. publicly traded company. Can wage and price controls for everyone be far behind? The Treasury says that's not what it has in mind, but then much of what government has done in the past eight months would have been scoffed at even a year ago. Richard Nixon disavowed wage and price controls right up until the time he imposed them in 1971. The Obama...

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration has begun serious talks about how it can change compensation practices across the financial-services industry, including at companies that did not receive federal bailout money, according to people familiar with the matter. The initiative, which is in its early stages, is part of an ambitious and likely controversial effort to broadly address the way financial companies pay employees and executives, including an attempt to more closely align pay with long-term performance. Administration and regulatory officials are looking at various options, including using the Federal Reserve's supervisory powers, the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission...

Mercantilism [emphasis added]: An economic doctrine that flourished in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Mercantilists held that a nation's wealth consisted primarily in the amount of gold and silver in its treasury. Accordingly, mercantilist governments imposed extensive restrictions on their economies to ensure a surplus of exports over imports. In the eighteenth century, mercantilism was challenged by the doctrine of laissez-faire. When Barack Obama talks—and talks—about the future, does he really mean "back to the future"? You have to wonder after reading the column by one of his economic advisors in today's LA Times. In Renewing America's...