Author: Redactor

Categories
free trade & free markets initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

The 22 Franc Minimum Wage

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney agree with America’s progressives: raising the minimum wage is common sense.

The Swiss had a chance to prove their solidarity with that notion yesterday, when they voted on whether to establish a minimum wage in the country, a rather high one of 4000 francs per month (something close to 22 francs per hour). They voted the proposal down.

Overwhelmingly. By over 76 percent.Frederic Bastiat's classic essay, What Is Seen and What Is Unseen

Unlike in America, this minimum wage would have affected a huge hunk of the population. One out of ten Swiss workers earns less than the proposed minimum. In America, only about a single percentage of workers earns close to the national minimum.

This matters, as Frédéric Bastiat clearly explained, because price regulations can have two effects: a loss of production, or none at all — “either hurtful or superfluous.” No effect, when the price floor (as in a minimum wage) is set lower than the level most prices are already at (or, for which workers already work). But when the price floor gets set higher, goods go off the market — with too-high wage minimums, workers with low productivity cease to get hired.

Swiss voters could scarcely afford to risk the jobs of ten percent of the workforce.

In America, raising the minimum wage is usually a matter of sacrificing a few people (whom voters mostly don’t know — Bastiat’s “unseen”) while rejoicing in the higher wages of those workers retained (the “seen”).

In Switzerland, the government declared the down vote a victory for common sense.

Which it was.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Today

May 19, Oscar Wilde

On May 19, 1897, Oscar Wilde was released from Reading Prison. His “Ballad of Reading Gaol” would later become a classic, and his only great work following his imprisonment.

Categories
Thought

Frédéric Bastiat

Legislation that limits or hampers exchanges is always either hurtful or superfluous.
Governments that persuade themselves that nothing good can be done but through their instrumentality, refuse to acknowledge this harmonic law.
Exchange develops itself naturally until it becomes more onerous than useful, and at that point it naturally stops.

Categories
links

Townhall: An Alternate Political Program

What if the solution to the current political impasse would be to ignore party bosses and work with those with whom we disagree on so much? After all, we don’t disagree on everything. Click on over to Townhall.com, for this week’s Common Sense foray into political strategy. And back here, for more reading.

Categories
video

Video: The Freedom and Rights of Poor People

William Easterly looks at the inherent callousness at the heart of modern talk of “development.” His starting point, below, is the big difference in ideas between 1974’s dual winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Gunnar Myrdal and F.A. Hayek. Myrdal supported a double standard. Hayek did not.

Myrdal also promoted a huge assumption we still live with today: that of the benevolent dictator, the one who gets all the credit for progress. The common folk, you see, are just pawns in the dictator’s hands.

Categories
Today

May 17 Watergate

On May 17, 1973, televised hearings regarding the Watergate scandal began in the United States Senate.

Categories
Today

May 16 events

On May 16, 1843, one thousand pioneers from Elm Grove, Missouri, set off for the Pacific Northwest, blazing what became known as the “Oregon Trail.”

Categories
ideological culture political challengers

The Next Coalition

Can the American people squeeze out the middle . . . like popping the world’s biggest zit?

Ralph Nader thinks the answer is Yes, if by “the middle” we mean the political center, where the Republican and Democratic Party higher-ups want to be, and where most folks in Congress find themselves.Unstoppable, by Ralph Nader

Huge swaths of the American people, he says, are ready for some big changes. But the ruling insider class stands in the way.

What is needed? A coalition of progressives and libertarians and other independents willing to work together on issues like

  • initiative and referendum rights in every state and locality;
  • stricter ethical standards for representatives;
  • an end to bailouts of businesses and investors;
  • a rational attack on the eternal and sumptuous giveaways to contractors for the Pentagon; and much more.

Nader thinks a coalition like this is, as the title of his book has it, “Unstoppable.”

His book hasn’t been getting the attention it deserves. (Even from me: I’m at Disney World as I write this, and somehow reading of books hasn’t exactly taken over my schedule.) Nader, one of the most influential activists in American history, has hit a nerve, but not a lot of media outlets. I’m told he did chat with the folks on Fox Business News’s The Independents, but he could use more readers and more listeners.

Interestingly, Nader tips his hat to my day-job outfit, Citizens in Charge, as “already at work” doing what needs getting done, putting citizens (not well-connected businesses and pressure groups) at the center of the government.

By working for greater ballot access and initiative rights everywhere.

So, join us. (And I promise: no more pimple-popping metaphors.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

James Mill

There is nothing in the world, where a government is, in any degree, limited and restrained, so useful for getting rid of all limit and restraint, as wars. The power of almost all governments is greater during war than during peace. But in the case of limited governments, it is so, in a very remarkable degree.

Categories
ballot access

Politicians Need Petition Experience

On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the 49-year, 25-term congressman representing bankrupt Detroit, made big news. According to the Wayne County clerk, Conyers failed to gather enough voter signatures to earn a spot on the Democratic Party Primary ballot this Fifth of August.John Conyers

Still, I stand by my Townhall column’s prediction: the congressman will be on that ballot. Conyers ran afoul of a law requiring petition passers to be registered voters. It is unconstitutional. The ACLU filed suit on Monday to overturn it.

Conyers only had to manage a mere one thousand signatures, which hardly seems too tough for a seasoned incumbent. Conversely, Michiganders petitioning for a statewide ballot measure must secure 258,087 voter signatures — 322,609 for a citizen-initiated constitutional amendment.

Conyers isn’t alone in flunking Petition Drive 101. Two years ago, Republican Congressman Thaddeus McCotter resigned after several staff members falsified signatures on his petition.

Michigan’s policy, making major-party politicians gather a small number of voter signatures to obtain ballot status — independent and minor party candidates must often collect much larger numbers — is not a mere useless hurdle. If adopted universally, it could provide a large number of examples that our powerful politicians actually have surprisingly weak support.

Moreover, making politicians petition might stir their sympathy for the struggles citizens face in gathering signatures. Working my day job with Citizens in Charge, I witness constant attacks on the initiative petition process from legislators, who claim it’s “too easy” to put issues on the ballot.

Which, of course, means that those politicians haven’t ever tried.

Politicians often tell us how important “experience” is.

Give them some.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.