A complaint we often see from the left is that “real wages” are not rising; that by exporting jobs to China and elsewhere we are causing people’s incomes here not to go up. The reality–well detailed by Henry Hazlitt in his indispensable “Economics in one lesson”–is that we ARE getting wealthier. What is happening is that at the same wage, you can BUY MORE. The average American household today has many things that were undreamt of 30 years ago. Microwaves used to be luxuries, and computers unheard of.
Now, at those same wages (if we even accept this analysis, which I am willing to do in principle since it doesn’t matter) we have MUCH more. We have more furniture, TV’s, stereos, iPods, cars, etc. We take these things for granted, but anyone over 40 remembers three TV stations, and one TV.
The way Capitalism works best is if you let people create. When one industry moves away, new ones are created. When leftist talk about wages, what they are mainly talking about are UNION wages, since they are the ones who help get them elected, and their complaint is that they are not making MORE money for the SAME amount of work. Why would such a thing be possible?
Leftists fear the loss of power of unions, since that is a big part of the money machine that funds them. This entire health insurance take-over cannot be understood without reference to the benefits it provides the UNIONS.
As Hazlitt says, you can always help one group at the expense of another, and always help everyone in the short run, at the expense of the long run. In this particular case, for every person helped by this bill 4 or more will be hurt; and whatever good it does in its first few years will be devastatingly counterbalanced by the debt it will cause, and by the massive disruptions in a system which until now has been the world’s best.