During the summer I have been using a parking garage near my lab. The only problem is that there has been extensive road work being done on the access road that connects the parking garage to the main road. Quite frequently, the construction requires reducing the road to one lane for both sides of traffic. When this occurs, a construction worker must hold a sign up that on one side tells traffic to stop and on the other side tells the traffic to proceed slowly. Working in pairs the two construction workers control the flow of traffic.

As I was being directed a thought occurred to me. What’s the market value of a guy standing in place and periodically rotating a sign? More to the point, does this job’s market value exceed the cost of a living wage? If I were to hazard a guess I would say no. The market does not put enough value on this skill to support life. If a person were to do nothing but direct traffic all day with a sign he would eventually die of starvation because he does not make enough money doing that to live.

It’s in this scenario that liberals argue that this is precisely why minimum wage laws should be implemented. Let’s take this apart.

Free markets determine the honest value of some good or service. Thus, when the market determines that the value of twirling signs to control traffic is below a living wage we can reasonably argue that people at their most honest are unwilling to pay these traffic controllers more than what is required to survive. I wish to be very clear here. Market value represents the closest measure of what people will honestly pay for some service or good.

When liberals respond emotionally to the worker being unable to support himself by demanding the state implement minimum wage laws, liberals are distorting the honest market determined value of the labor. In this analysis, consumers have expressed their desire to pay less and liberal have expressed their desire to pay more than the living wage for this kind of labor. It’s liberal belief versus consumer belief.

In setting up the analysis in this way I wish to emphasize which group is calling on state coercion to force their beliefs on to everyone else. The consumer, working through the free market, by definition, does not call on the state’s coercion to force people to pay less for traffic control labor. The consumer simply gives their honest response to how much they are willing to pay for that kind of labor, and in the aggregate the market determines that this value is not enough to support a living wage. On the other hand, seeing that consumers are unwilling to pay a living wage for this kind of labor liberals demand that the state use its coercion to force consumers to pay a wage that exceeds the living wage. In sum, liberals unhappy with how much consumers are willing to pay for some kinds of labor, call on the state to force those consumers to pay more for their labor.

Just in case there is doubt, it really is the case that liberals want to force their belief of how much labor should cost on to everyone else. For you see there is no law forbidding one person to give money to another person. If liberals were only concerned with these workers, then all they would need to do is pool their money together and distribute it to the workers. However, this is not enough for liberals, for they want the state to forcibly make consumers, who disagree with them, to pay more than they are willing to for this labor. No matter how liberals justify using coercion at the end of the day they are forcing their beliefs on others.

I honestly can’t see how this is different from conservatives that want to force their morality on to other people. Religious folk find abortion morally objectionable. Since this procedure is open to the free market, we find that is has market value since consumers are willing to pay for the procedure. Conservatives are unhappy with some consumers being able to pay for an abortion since it will lead to the death of a human. This is similar to the outrage liberals express when our sign twirling traffic controller starves to death because he is not paid a living wage. Conservatives call on the state to force other consumers to not use this procedure, in the same way that liberals call on the state to force other consumers to pay more for traffic controlling labor.

It’s in this regard that I can’t see much difference between liberals and conservatives. They both wish
to expand state power simply to coerce people to behave in a manner they prefer.

Look how this billionaire is squandering his wealth.

The machine, named Anton, in homage to Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a pioneer in microbiology, is a bold gamble to jump ahead of the most powerful general-purpose supercomputers by as much as a half decade.

It could be used to investigate problems of great scientific interest, like the folding of protein molecules, and in the design of drugs based on the simulated biological activity of different molecules.

The effort is being led by David E. Shaw, a billionaire computer scientist. In the 1990s, Mr. Shaw was one of the most successful of an elite group of technologists pursuing computer-based trading strategies on Wall Street. Several years ago Mr. Shaw, who is also a major investor in Schrdinger, a chemical simulation software firm, stepped away from day-to-day management of his investment firm, D. E. Shaw & Company. He is now chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research.

It just goes to show the old adage is true. Rich people will waste limitless wealth on luxury. Just think how much good this money would do in the hands of the state. Under Bush, the rich have gotten richer and have wasted that excessive wealth on things like ‘developing technology’. What about Carl from down the street? He might not like working, but needs another bottle of wine. How could that possibly be a waste? Your liberal heart is in the right place.

Darwin argues in a previous post:

The problem is that if you’re allowed to pay people 1/2 of a living wage for a 40 hour work week, that’s what employers will pay, and poor people will work 2 jobs for 80 hours a week because it’s better than starving to death. Certainly there will be more jobs, but enough of them will be performed by the same person that unemployment won’t go down any (may go up).

I really dislike the use of the term ‘you’re allowed’. It implies that the only force keeping employers from arbitrarily determining the value of labor is state regulation. It belies a woefully ignorant understanding of economics.

By eliminating minimum wage employers will not have the freedom to charge what they please for labor. Employers are still bound to the value of labor which is determined by the market. Employers that attempt to pay less than that will have difficulties finding employees while employers that charge more that the value of labor will have an abundance of applicants. Over time employers that refuse to pay the minimum value of labor will lose out to employers that will pay the value of labor.

There is irony here. You seem to be implying that value of labor is arbitrarily determined when left up to the markets. Yet I would argue that in fact the arbitrary determination of value in labor only occurs when politicians get involved. In a free markets system there is no coercion, therefore labor value reflects the actual value of the labor. However, when you apply the state’s coercive force to implement a minimum wage you distort the value of labor. But on what grounds do you justify distorting the value of labor?

At this point you would justify that distortion on the grounds that poor people should be able to make a ‘living wage’. Here though is the problem. How do you define living wage? Most likely I would object to your definition. That is simply to say that necessarily the definition of ‘living wage’ must be arbitrary, therefore the distortion you elected politicians to implement must also be arbitrary.

In matters of determining the value of labor, it’s not the employer with the freedom to arbitrarily determine the value of labor, it’s the politician. As always this is because the politician can invoke the state’s monopoly of coercion to distort the value of the labor as he sees fit.

I will never understand why you trust the state more than the free market. The state has coercion while the market does not. And yet, you foolishly trust the state over the free market.

By making them unemployed.

This year, it’s harder than ever for teens to find a summer job. Researchers at Northeastern University described summer 2007 as “the worst in post-World War II history” for teen summer employment, and those same researchers say that 2008 is poised to be “even worse.”

According to their data, only about one-third of Americans 16 to 19 years old will have a job this summer, and vulnerable low-income and minority teens are going to fare even worse.

Minimum wage is a really bad idea. Its built off the assumption that entry level positions should be able to support a person. The problem is that the value a minimum wage position offers an employer is not valuable enough to justify the cost of supporting the employee. As a consequence, using the states monopoly on coercion to forcibly regulate the cost of labor in these positions forces employees to eliminate these positions to avoid a loss in value.

This really is a perfect example of how liberal regulation to ‘help the poor’ actually hurts the poor. Just think, liberals want to regulate health care to help the poor. I’m sure that will end well.

Instapundit links to story reporting on Florida recently passing a law prohibiting businesses from keeping employees from bringing locked and stored weapons on to their premise. I won’t deny thats its nice to see legislator actually passing legislation that supports my constitutional right, butI ultimately I can’t support this bill. Since these are private companies they should be allowed to determine for themselves as to whether their employees can or can not bring firearms to work. In my view its not the state’s business to tell private companies that they must allow employees to bring firearms on their property.

If you are generally antipathetic towards guns and find my current position interesting, don’t get too excited. I also don’t think the state should tell private companies not to discriminate or build handicap accessible infrastructure. Unless their is explicit harm being done, the state should keeps its hand off private property.

An excellent post at TCS daily makes some interesting points equating the power of super wealthy people and politicians.

Montgomery County, Maryland, has an annual budget of $3.8 billion. This sum is under the control of a County Council with nine members. On an average per-politician basis, each County Council member controls just over $400 million a year in spending.

To put an annual spending figure of $400 million in perspective, consider this: if you had $8 billion in assets and earned 5 percent per year on those assets, that would give you $400 million in annual income. And few Americans have that much. The world’s wealthiest person is Warren Buffett, with $62 billion (admittedly he has often been able to earn more than 5 percent per year from investments). Bill Gates has $58 billion. Fewer than 40 Americans have more than $8 billion in assets, and their names are largely familiar to us–the Waltons of Wal-Mart, Sergie Brin and Larry Page of Google, and so on.

Can you name the members of the County Council in Montgomery County, Maryland? I can’t name very many of them, and I live there. Still, getting elected to the County Council in Montogmery County, which is pretty far down the ladder in terms of political power in the United States, enables you to control more annual spending than the wealth of Donald Trump or Steven Jobs.

At the Federal level, the Budget is $3 trillion. If you divide that by 535 (the number of of Senators and Congressmen), then on average each legislator controls over $5 billion in spending per year. That is more than even the world’s richest person could spend annually.

He goes on to argue that:

Thus, the comparison between legislators and the super-rich is actually quite apt. Both are able to exert an unusually large level of control over which worthy causes receive money. Financially, wealthy people and politicians have the same type of power. The difference is that politicians have much, much more of it, by orders of magnitude.

Making one final point he states:

The monetary comparisons only scratch the surface of the inequality and excesses of political power in the United States. Bill Gates might be said to control as much money as a member of the County Council where I live. But he does not have the power to, say, tell the people of the County where they can and cannot smoke, or to tell local businesses what wages they must pay their workers, or to decide whether a local concert venue will be devoted to folk music or to rock.

This is about right. Politicians that are in control of large budgets have more money to spend on others than any rich person could over possibly hope to spend. Not only do theses politicians have this ridiculous amount of power, they then have power to outright ban and regulate. Politicians have a ridiculous amount of power.

The author of the post argues for fracturing the political landscape as a means of dispersing the power. I think this is a very wise suggestion. The best way to protect a democracy is planting safeguards preventing the excessive consolidation of power. Make it harder to get laws passed.

I would also like to point out, since many of my reader lean left, that many of the income redistribution polices you support are the kinds of polices that give politician more power. If you think its right to forcibly take money from one group of people and place it into the hands of another you must realize you are giving power to a class of people whose job it is to define the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’. In supporting such policy you are supporting the consolidation of power into the political class.

Both in 2000 and the current presidential race we hear rhetoric about uniting the country. As if it’s desirable that their is accordance between politicians. If you ask me such unity is scary and normally leads to policy that further consolidates power into an ever shrinking political class.

Wal-Mart is clearly not beholden to anyone. Take for example this story. Several years ago a worker for Wal-Mart, which has health coverage with the company was severely injured in a car accident. Built into the health care plan was a clause that allowed Wal-Mart to recover loses its paid out for the medical expense if the policy holder successfully sues another company for those damages. Wal-Mart was using this clause to get back its losses from the worker.

Since Wal-Mart is a powerful corporation beholden to no one but greedy stockholders who only care about profits there was no way this massive juggernaut could be stopped. I figured they were going to legally take this money away from this disabled person.

A former Wal-Mart employee who suffered severe brain damage in a traffic accident won’t have to pay back the company for the cost of her medical care, Wal-Mart told the family Tuesday.

“Occasionally, others help us step back and look at a situation in a different way. This is one of those times,” Wal-Mart Executive Vice President Pat Curran said in a letter. “We have all been moved by Ms. Shank’s extraordinary situation.”

I AM SHOCKED. ABSOLUTELY SHOCKED.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think a large corporation could be influenced by things other than GREED and PROFIT. I figured the only way Wal-Mart could be stopped from legally taking this money was if extensive regulations were passed at the federal level forcing Wal-Mart to care about things other than GREED and PROFIT, like love and hugs.

This changes everything. So corporations are influence by things other than GREED an PROFIT. Maybe legislation isn’t the only way to exert influence on large corporations. This has really opened my eyes.

Use the state to regulate an industry to prevent monopolies and what will inevtiably happen? The companies will find ways to manipulate the state to give them the monopoly.

Comcast hired a bored and sleepy claque to attend the latest Federal Communications Commission hearing on the company’s blockage of internet traffic, thus preventing interested parties from sitting in. Michael Weiss has the techie reaction to the cable giant’s pushback against its opponents.

Sigh, its just so much easier to let free markets ‘regulate’ then let ‘experts’ inform bureaucrats on how an industry should be ran.

I oppose this legislation:

There are signs that the “concealed carry” group was making headway even before the tragedy at Northern Illinois. Earlier this month the South Dakota House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to force state universities to allow students to carry weapons on campus, according to GOP state Rep. Tom Brunner. The bill, which Brunner sponsored, recently died in the state senate, but Brunner said he intends to bring it back as soon as he can. “It’s not an issue that’s going to go away,” Brunner said. “We feel pretty passionate [that] students and teachers should have a right to defend themselves, and weapons on campus should be a part of the plan.”

The state has no business interfering with a private entities rules and regulations. I would be more amenable to the state saying that if you don’t follow this legislation then we will pull state funding from the school. You know, give Universities incentive to behave in a fashion the state deems appropriate.

Playing video games can increase violence.

Playing video games increases aggression in some children and young adults and normalizes killing, some doctors said.

Research suggests that violent video games can make children feel different. A brain scan of a teenager who has just played what was deemed a nonviolent video game was compared to the scan of a teen who had just spent 30 minutes playing a violent game. Indiana School of Medicine researchers said highlighted areas in the brains showed increased activity in the areas involved in emotional arousal.

“Exposure to violent video games, even E rated video games, increases aggressive thoughts, increases pro-social behavior and increases general arousal,” said Dr. Greg Snyder, a psychologist at Omaha’s Children’s Hospital.

Clearly their is a need for tougher regulation on video game playing. Its seems unwise to have our children being pushed into more violent modes of thinking because of video games.

Perhaps we could ban all video games that are evaluated to be to violent. Or maybe instead just make it illegal to sell these games to those under eighteen.