A minimum wage simply means that anyone whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage will be unemployed, and in a welfare society like ours, this means that we will be poorer both of the small value of his labor and the larger value of the relief given to him.
A minimum wage is as useless as a price control. It does more damage than welfare alone does by itself.
There are a helluvalotta Dutchmen who USED to be wealthy, until the tulips crashed.
Tulips really aren't worth that much - unless half your countrymen have temporarily gone insane and are buying all of them in sight. I personally cannot wait for the housing bubble to break. You know what the first thing I'm going to do in the event that housing prices radically go down? Well, buy a house. Me and everyone else. So I'm kind of skeptical that real estate and homes in particular are going to be selling for pennies an acre anywhere in my lifetime. Maybe speculators will get burnt for part of their investment if prices readjust to meet actual demand, but I suspect for most people a house is a good investment. 'Cause, you know, they plan to live in it?
We should include health care reform, tax reform, tort reform, etc in with these FT agreements. Otherwise the deck will be stacked against American's because of our onerous government burden.
This is insightful. As stated above, the three things hurting American manufacturing, production, and consumers are: 1.) Litigation, 2.) Regulation, 3.) and Taxation. They're all government derived. The last thing anyone needs (except the protected companies that stand to directly benefit at the cost of everyone else in America) is more government subsidies in the form of tariffs.
No doubt. I'm circling like a vulture. Oops! Does that make me a capitalist, or [gasp] a "free-trader?" If I gratuitously bash Milton Friedman in order to establish my paleo-bloshevik cred, will I be ok?