Darwin writes in response to my last post:

As I said, the basic problem is that we have way more labor avaialble than is actually needed

I don’t understand what ‘more labor available than is actually needed’ means. If the country can employ about 95% of the citizenry it seems to me that supply and demand of labor is being met.

As always, in your calculation of social welfare you leave out large variables. Arguing that minimum wage does not harm those in the middle class is wrong. Increased minimum wage means either reduction in jobs, which hurts the poor, or increases in price, which hurts the poor and everyone else. Admittedly, forced increased pricing in labor will harm the poor more than the middle class but nevertheless you seem to be oblivious to this harm. If you force an increase in labor value that increase has to come out of somewhere. More likely than not the adjustment for the increase will harm the poor more because they have less resources to absorb it.

There is a reality here you seem to be in denial about. People will only pay so much for minimum wage labor. It turns out that value in labor is not enough to support the person to a degree you seem comfortable with. Quite honestly, how much money do you think a person that can put keyboards on a shelf should be paid? Should such a basic skill that practically everyone can do fetch a ‘living wage’? Turns out when we ask the market, which is most likely the best measure for the value of labor it turns out no. People are unwilling to pay a living wage for basic labor.

Sensing an injustice, you demand the state step in and take care of the problem. You support an expansion in state power to forcibly take money from people unwilling to pay what you deem is appropriate for basic labor. For all your talk about fearing corporations it seems odd that you happily grant the state, the entity with a monopoly on coercion, more power simply to improve what you consider to be a social ill.

And let’s not beat around the bush. You want people with guns to take money away from people without guns (you deny the 2nd amendment don’t you?) and give that money to people you deem worthy. You justify one injustice by ‘curing’ another supposed injustice. It’s okay to steal from one group when you are helping another group. Unless of course you’re rich, then it’s wrong to steal from the poor.

And that takes me to this statement:

Your position seems to be that they should get paid what their labor is ‘worth’, as though the realities of a free market are actual moral imperatives rather than empirical facts that we can employ towards moral ends when appropriate.

I make no claim about moral imperatives. I simply make the observation that the market is the best measure we have of the value of labor. Attempts to ‘remedy’ that value will require moral justification. It’s you department to morally justify why it’s okay to use coercion to make people do your bidding.

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.

This opinion piece notes the differential treatment politicians show resource development depending on who owns the resources.

I have another theory. And mine fits the pattern of resource development – or lack thereof – all over the Western Hemisphere. It comes down to this: Where government has the property right, restrictions on development tend to be low. But when the private sector is the owner, environmental concerns blossom.

Exhibit A is Petrobras. Not only did Mr. Gabrielli say there is no appetite for stopping offshore projects in his country. He went further. “Brazil has one of the freest and most investor-oriented regulation in the world. Even freer than the United States of America,” he said, referring to the climate for oil exploration.

That may be so, but it would be interesting to know why, given Brazil’s prominent embrace of socialism. It could be that the country is changing. After all there is now private-sector competition in the oil industry. Yet it is also worth noting that the Brazilian government has a 58% controlling stake in Petrobras’s voting shares and 32% of its total shares. This means that some of Petrobras profits go straight to the government’s bottom line, giving the politicians more money to spend on bribing their constituents.

In the U.S., Congress doesn’t have nearly such a vested interest in a successful oil industry. What good are corporate profits if they go to shareholders, pensioners and employees? Congress has even been denied the windfall profits tax. For American politicians there is a much greater incentive to respond to the concentrated power of the special interest group known as the “greens.”

Surely you jest. Attempts to ‘protect’ the environment are better understood as rhetorical means to consolidate voters than to, you know, protect the environment. This is surprising to me.

If you ask me resource development should be managed privately and that only a minimal amount of regulation. Politicians should not be able to gain power from the resources or misguided political groups with naive views of the environment.

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.

The crime is so bad in DC that the police are going to implement no go zones. This decision has prompted Instapundit to remark:

IT’S A QUAGMIRE: U.S. out of D.C. now!…. Nothing we can do will stop these people from committing senseless acts of violence. It’s in their culture. The best thing we can do is to withdraw and leave them to each other. . . .

His comments are based on this quote:

D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.

Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.

Is this a fair application of the Anti-war argument that Iraqis are incapable of peaceful democracy? If not why? Giving the obvious answer that because DC is the capitol of our country is uninteresting.

Its worth noting that DC has banned handguns and the violence is so bad that the police are going to apply some rather extreme methods to control it. Gun control is certainly the solution to gun violence.

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UPDATE: Welcome to those from Instapundit! Make sure you check out my libertarian web comic Smith and Engels. Its freaking awesome.

Have you ever heard of a anything in mathematics being characterized as being pathological.

In mathematics, quaternions are a non-commutative extension of complex numbers. They were first described by the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space. At first, quaternions were regarded as pathological because they disobeyed the commutative law ab = ba. Although they have been superseded in most applications by vectors and matrices, they still find uses in both theoretical and applied mathematics, in particular for calculations involving three-dimensional rotations, such as in 3D computer graphics.

I don’t know about you but I hate it when my numbers set goes all pathological on me. And whats with it ignoring the commutative property. I don’t care if I’m in quaternionland, 3 x 4 equals 4 x 3. Biatch.

I would need to know all the details but on the face of it, this seems like a valid issue to strike about.

Union workers on MGM Mirage Inc.’s multibillion dollar CityCenter project struck late Monday after talks broke down between the Nevada Building and Construction Trades Council, casino giant MGM Mirage and project general contractor Perini Building Co. Construction workers have also walked off of the Cosmopolitan Resort project, another Perini run project.

The strike follows the deaths of six men on the CityCenter project, the latest death occurred Saturday when 39-year-old Dustin Tarter, a crane worker, was killed. Two workers have died on the Cosmopolitan project.

In a 11 a.m. news conference, Steve Ross with the Southern Nevada Building & Construction Trades Council said every property on the Las Vegas Strip has a safety issue.

“This is the sixth death since the start of the construction of the CityCenter project and this is unacceptable,” said Ross.

How many of you would support laws that prevent inciting hatred and discrimination on racial or religious grounds?

More bad news in Iraq. May marks the grimmest month in terms of numbers since MSM began covering the war:

Yesterday ended the month with the fewest Coalition casualties since nearly the beginning of the war in Iraq. There were only about 20 combat-related deaths during the entire month of May. Hopefully portending even better things to come, only about five of those deaths occurred during the final two weeks of the month.

It isn’t about body counts, however, since one way to ensure a low casualty rate is to sequester American forces on forward operating bases. What makes the statistic even more impressive is that the low death total came even as the operational tempo was as busy as ever.

The lack of coverage on such numbers has some experts questioning the objectivity of MSM editors. Some even suggesting that perhaps their coverage has been biased.