Category: Uncategorized

It’s strange: I will at times feel utter clarity on things, then when I try to type it, it gets fuzzy. Words really are poor tools, but they are all we have in most times and places. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I think mainly in words. I see/feel things, then describe them, always with a loss.

The salient point I wanted to make about the murders in Norway this past week is that I think it would be worth creating a continuum between those who believe in collective guilt, and those who believe in individualism.

Necessarily, if one says it is “societies” fault that person X is failing, then society is culpable. If a crime has been committed, then society commited the crime. The point people miss is that this does not in the slightest diminish the importance of the crime, or the horror with which certain people view the “crime”, so much as relocate the locus of blame and following anger and hate from the actual person, to an amorphous entity created in the abstract, but “collected” in the real world.

In a properly developed Leftist collective, to be accused is to be guilty. To believe otherwise would be to imply the collective were capable of error. Needless to say, you do not give your heart, mind and body to an error-prone entity, so it is much easier to reconcile the punishment of the innocent with justice, than to extricate oneself from a cocoon which protects you from anomie.

What this fellow did was no different in principle than Bill Ayers attacking American soldiers, who at Fort Dix were no doubt in large measure drafted. To be clear, it was incompetence–not a lack of malignancy–which prevented that bombing from being the most serious and deadly in American history.

This was no different in principle from Hitler singling out the Jews, or Lenin the “bourgeoisie”, or Pol Pot and his sociopathic children the “intellectuals.”

In all cases, generalized abstractions were applied to concrete individuals. Have there been examples of greedy Jewish bankers? Of course. There have also been greedy German bankers, and greedy Indian bankers. Are most Jews guilty of anything? Of course not.

Were the “bourgeoisie” guilty of crimes against the people? Some, perhaps, particularly noblemen who took their estates by force at some point in remote history. But the factory owner, or windmill owner, or successful merchant? People like that CREATE wealth. The factory owner employs people. The windmill owner likewise. Both produce products needed by “the people”. The merchant helps create markets for them and others, helping build the general economy.

Yet scenes reminiscent of Kristallnacht happened over and over in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik victory. Homes were broken in to by the Cheka, the men shot, the women raped, and everything that moved taken away. Some of the women they even consolidated in brothels, where they would have vodka and cocaine parties.

This guy in Norway, whatever his name was, saw these children as abstractions. They were not real to him. They were guilty because of their membership in some group. Admittedly, they were likely all leftists.

But first and foremost, they were human beings. You convince human beings. You channel your anger into coherence and understanding. That is what I do. The madder I get, the harder I think, and more work I put into educating myself.

Self evidently, what B. did will be counterproductive to conservatism generally. We already face a foe with a prodigious capacity for propaganda and deception. This makes me angry. But see above: the proper reaction is to think, understand, and then educate others. We cannot beat them with raw power. Their system is predicated on power, and they know how to aggregate it. If we aggregate it for them, the momentum will soon enough slip into any form of human government but that of liberal democracy, the rule of law, and political freedom.

I found it interesting if unsurprising that he was a Dexter fan. I have posted on this before. It is a recurring topic for me, but here is one of my longer treatments of that show and media violence in general: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2010/09/dexter-murder-and-mass-media_23.html

I think this question that I asked there is a good one: “are you starting with the desire for justice, or the desire to harm others, and a need to justify it”?

Ted Kazynski (close) was a bright guy. He was not obviously psychopathic. I have no doubt he could hold a close to normal conversation with most people. Yet something was so separated from other human beings that he could and did treat them as interchangeable objects.

Tonight I watched two typical kids of middle to upper middle class backgrounds park their parent’s Volvo or something similar, and come in to the sushi bar I was at. One of them had a T-shirt on it that said “I require to be immersed fully in human waste”. Not so pleasant an image for a restaurant. Sade, of course, has many images like that, which I personally have not chosen to inflict on anyone in any of my writings.

I looked at them. The thought that occurred to me is that anyone who would consciously choose to put objectionable images in other people’s minds–to attack them qualitatively–is someone lacking both empathy, and the capacity for innocent happiness.

Watch kids interacting with their telephones and computers. They are interacting with people via the medium of objects. There is something different between the physical presence of someone, and their text messages. Yet this causes or facilitates some of the zombie behavior–the living death of lacking the capacity for genuine pleasure.

Again, this Norwegian grew up in what was obviously a reasonably well balanced home. His radicalization happened within the context of playing violent video games–many modelled on training software developed by the military to desensitive soldiers to killing–and watching shows like Dexter, which don’t just glorify violence, but also an incapacity for human feeling, and following taste for the darker “pleasure” of sadism. This is the metaphor of the vampire, who is dead, but keeps moving by literally sucking the life out of others.

As I think about it, perhaps the best comparison is that of Columbine. Rich kids, saturated in both violence and self pity, treating the world as a unified whole, and their own freedom of action as a curse.

Few thoughts. I had more, but I am tired.

Few points:

1) Our national debt is set to increase some $7 trillion over the next ten years. Most of the media talk of “cuts” has to do with decreasing the amount we go into debt, not actually decreasing our debt. Nobody has done that successfully since FDR initiated our spending orgy, which has sped up and slowed down periodically in the years since. Clinton just balanced the annual budget, without making a dent in the underlying debt, and despite promises to the contrary anyone with a pulse and a positive IQ knew would be broken, Obama has of course initiated very consciously destructive massive spending, and put in place massive tax increases to be instituted after the 2012 election. This is what deceiving nihilists do: they put their little time bombs in places nobody can see them, right away.

Thus, in my understanding, an increase of “merely” $3 trillion constitutes, in an Obamaworld Republicans are largely letting him get away with, a “cut” of $4 trillion. This is farcical. Even conservative radio hosts seem unable to grasp this point.

2) The top 1% of taxpayers pay more than the bottom 95% of Americans. The top 10% of income earners pay something on the order of 60% of all taxes, and the bottom 40% or so only pay the regressive 15.2% or so taxes used to fund current Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits, which most of them will never receive. They pay no income tax at all.

3) Corporations are always double taxes. The entity itself is taxed, which makes it harder for it to create jobs, since that is money that cannot be invested in expansion. It is, on the contrary, given to unionized Federal employees, many of whom view it as their job to make business as hard as possible.

Secondly, the employees are taxed, from the CEO to the janitor. As mentioned, the janitor pays no income tax, but has, in effect, to bear the full 15.2% (I think that is right: I am adding direct contributions to what the company pays; I believe it is 6.2% of earnings for SSA, and 2.9% for Medicare/Medicaid; I don’t know what Unemployment is, but it is likely added on to that–that is a topic for another day). The CEO is taxed on his income, and everything he buys, from homes to yachts, to watches to cars.

Thus only fools argue that any corporation pays no taxes, or that reducing tax rates somehow constitutes “corporate welfare”. Welfare is when you take something from one person by force of law, and give it to someone else. What is happened with corporations is that less is being taken directly in corporate taxation, which enables business growth, and following increases in income and other taxes.

4) We pay interest on the national debt. I see different numbers, but is currently somewhere between about $250 billion and $400 trillion. Certainties are that it is going up, and that at some point the sheer size of our debt will create questions about our ability to pay, and following increases in the rate we pay to get people to finance that debt. Currently, Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing–money printing, which is gifted to member banks in the Federal Reserve System that Americans can neither control nor even monitor effectively–is what is keeping these interest rates down. We could at some point be paying a trillion in interest alone.

Since he is a liar, Obama in my understanding does not even factor interest in to his purported cuts; neither the present interest, nor any projections on what future interest is likely to be, particularly given the likelihood at some point of a downgrade.

5) There is no amount of taxation on the rich that can pay for this. They already pay a disproportionately high amount, and history is abundant evidence that increases in nominal tax rates on the “rich” do not necessarily lead to increases in actual income. Foolish people assume that the rich simply hand their money over willingly. They don’t: they move their money into tax free bonds, move it offshore, or simply leave it in the bank or gold, none of which are economically productive. Capital gains, which ignorant people want to call unearned income, is always the result of some productive economic activity, which normally consists in providing capital for some job-producing activity, whether building a house, or expanding production in something.

We could literally confiscate the combined wealth of the richest 10% of Americans, and I don’t think would pay our bills for more than a year, and the effects would lead to us turning into Cuba in short order: totalitarian, utterly impoverished, and utterly bereft of any valid reason for hope.

I have endured far more than my fair share of hate on the internet, for the simple reason that in large measure I sought it out. I spent years “debating” people who more than likely wanted me dead, because I found it useful. It is useful because when you get angry, at least in my case, it heightens my focus and enables all sorts of new perceptions to occur that would not have happened if people had not been doing their best to wound me emotionally. On balance, that whole process was useful, even if I’ve transcended it, in large measure.

One thing that one immediately notices on almost all message boards the internet over, though, is emotional shallowness and lack of empathy, which of course are traits indicative of retarded emotional intelligence.

It seems to me that people express their real selves behind pseudonyms, so these boards are, I think somewhat useful in cultural analysis. Clearly, it is a certain type of person who spends all day in front of a computer, whose social contacts are primarily virtual, and who feels the need to foster group cohesion by denigrating other people whose only crime is difference and perhaps awkwardness. We read regularly about kids whose lives are torn apart by Facebook or Twitter or other aggression.

Kids that are out shooting hoops and bussing tables are not, in general, the problem.

If we generalize, humanity has spent most of its history in warfare. In most cultures for most of the time, men more or less owned their women and could hit them or their children any time they pleased. Violence has characterized our past, and it should come as no surprise that it is seen on the internet.

At the same time, it is hard not to imagine that something has been lost in our age, when children don’t HAVE to socialize, and can instead spend endless hours “playing” with interactive but more or less imaginary friends. Apparently kids that play “World of Warcraft” often play it 30-40 a week or more. Their social universe is in effect abstract, and this leads, in my view, to emotional and social retardation. The image I have is bread that is baked before it has risen properly. It is just too thick in the middle.

It is of course easy to picture the “good old days”, which I suspect were much tougher for most people than we are able to imagine. At the same time, the one concrete metric I would suggest might shed some light is our shared fondness for poetry. Virtually all cultures for all of history have had their epic stories, that made men and women rejoice and cry as the fortunes of their heroes waxed and waned. One can readily imagine a storyteller by a campfire reciting Gilgamesh 3,000 years ago, to an audience that knew the story well, but wanted always to hear it one more time.

We have lost that. We have, in large measure, lost Shakespeare, and Keats, and all the emotional “tuning” that such imaginative and evocative writing enables. We calibrate as machines, and machines are not sensitive or empathetic. They understand software algorithyms–they understand conformity to behavioral and emotive standards, normally based on shared aggression and a bestial sense of humor–but not what it means to truly see other people. They can’t see themselves. They are not developed. Why would they see others?

This is a cultural problem whose extent I find impossible to diagnose. I am simply describing it for now.

Posted this quote and commentary in a couple places after the publicized tiff with QVC. What people need to grasp is that Jane Fonda commited treason, which for this purpose is defined as “adhering to their [note the plural of the United States] Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort”. Posing with AA guns which could and did kill American pilots, and helping the NVA propaganda effort clearly qualify. 100 years before that she would have been shot or hung, no questions asked, and none needed. Her public statements and publicity photos said it all. Likewise, Bill Ayers would and should have been hung from a tall oak tree, rather than spending a career researching the indoctrination of children.

From Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War”: “[NVA Colonel] Bui Tin testified to the importance the North Vietnamese attached to the antiwar movement in the United States. ‘It was essential to our strategy’, said Tin. ‘Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9am to follow the growth of the American anti-war movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former attorney general Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that WE SHOULD HOLD ON IN THE FACE OF BATTLEFIELD REVERSES [emphasis mine]. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.”

The NVA agrees that she was a key war asset, FOR THEM. She should have been shot as a traitor. I am dead serious about that. Some 58,000 brave Americans, and many times that in Vietnamese died in that war.

I will add, that I have a listing of NVA atrocities, and some context, here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page21.html

The plain and unpleasant reality is that this woman helped facilitate mass torture, murder, and unimaginable misery for millions. This treatment is excessively kind.

There is no such thing as a right. If there were, then people could not violate them. The Muslim crudaders would not have been able to rape and enslave infidel men and women in their imperialistic expansionary period. The Scandinavian raiders would not have been able to rape and take as slaves for sale large sections of Europe. Dublin, Ireland, was in my understanding founded as a center for the slave trade.

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued (in my understanding, based on having read several internet pages devoted to him and the book “Wittgenstein’s Poker”) that non-empirical arguments are intrinsically either tautological or nonsensical.

If you define a right as “that which exists the way I conceive it”, then what you have said is that a right is equal to a “right”. The abstract ideal is equal to the word, which is equal to nothing empirically, and thus necessarily solipsistic, and meaningless in a social context.

When Jefferson modified Locke slightly in stipulating “self evident” rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, he was describing ideals, and not realities.

What he was REALLY saying is that in his considered view human felicity would more naturally flow from social and political orders oriented around those principles. He was quite right in this.

But we need to be careful with this word “right”, in how we use it. If we fail to see that these rights are stipulated in such a way that measurable effects can flow from them, then they become tools for tyranny. We can measure the effects of the ideals Jefferson offered us. In the last two hundred years we have grown steadily in the freedoms offered to American citizens, have grown in prosperity and power, and have done so, with a large 4 year interruption, in conditions of peace.

The “right” to income equality and other such rights no more exist that “rights” to life liberty or property. What we must look to is what empirically verifiable effects they “work to”, in the Hayekian sense.

Have to run. That will have to do.

We can measure intelligence, wealth, and physical capabilities. It is much harder to measure reality testing, which is to say how accurately someone’s worldview describes the way the world actually works, which is to say both a generally accurate philosophy–where accurate is defined as supporting on-going productive physical emotional and cognitive activity–and the capacity to understand the details of the concrete environment within which one is operating. The details of course will vary for everyone.

One would be tempted to suppose that in conditions of freedom success would imply this ability, but the fact is that you can be smart and unmotivated, you can be lucky, and you can be confined.

Self evidently, even beginning such a project involves a normative worldview, a baseline. Such things are implied in attempts to measure media “bias”, which is t say deviation from the way things “really work”. It is of course unsurprising that leftists view ABC and the like as impartial.

Several basic ideas that it seems to me should be present in any tolerably accurate version of the “real world” is that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, and that “what works for a little, will work more for a lot”. I can mix baking soda and vinegar together and get a reaction. I infer, accuratly, from this that if I mixed a ton of the one and the other together, a similar but much larger reaction would emerge.

We have only had one Great Depression. Not coincidentally, it is the only economic problem which we attempted to solve with Keynesian economics. The simple reality is that those ideas don’t work. If they worked, a small “stimulus” would cause a small effect, and a large one a large effect. As it happens, a small “stimulus” makes things worse, and an even larger one would cause a threat to our national existence, which is of course the whole idea. Keynes wanted a world without money, which of course could only work if people like him were telling us what we could have, and how much.

But I had mainly in mind here the African American communities in our large cities. Some 90% of them voted for Obama. Surely if a little doesn’t work, a lot works even less well? For 30-40 years they have voted for Democrats religiously around the country. What good has it done them? Surely at some point they will realize that if they keep doing what they have been doing, they will get more of what they have been getting?

Nancy Pelosi has done well for herself. Jesse Jzckaon and Jerry Wright have both made small fortunes pretending to help them. The benefits to them are concrete and “spendable”. The benefits to those in areas with 30-40% unemployment among younger people are invisible. How much worse could things get? 100% unemployment? That is the direction they are going.

I will add that one aspect of illegal Latino labor that is overlooked is that they represent a way around the minimum wage. Employers who do not pay Minimum Wage are already breaking the law. But it makes economic sense for both parties to enter into these labor agreements. The employer pays less, and the Mexicans are making what is for them good money. Again, these contracts are entered into voluntarily.

Nobody is asking young African Americans if they would prefer working for $4/hour to their current unemployment. The deal presented is that they “deserve” at least $7.25 (I think it is), and that this basic pricing floor protects them. Who is making this claim? People making $80,000/year or more–some millionaires–on the govermnent payroll, who live nowhere near the ghettoes.

Who is choosing for them? They sure aren’t. They just never see the jobs that are never created.

To be clear, basic economics tells us that if you pay someone X amount per hour, but they only produce X-y in output, you will go bankrupt. Then the job is gone. Kids who dropped out of high school after the 9th grade, and who have been in unstable, unnurturing homes their entire lives do not, initially, do good work. This is common sense. But if they want to try, they are worth something, and that first job is how they learn the skills they need to get a better second job, and so on. They can live with their parents-their mother, statisically, in the vast majority of cases–and help buy groceries, and move out when their skills become such that they can command much better wages.

My first job, back in the 80’s, paid $2.85/hour. I couldn’t live on that, but I didn’t try. I lived with my parents.

Kids that never enter the labor pool generally enter the prison system. As Reagan said “Some of the scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and here to help you”.

It is a source of a bit of–I guess I will use the word sorrow, as a way of mourning what could have been and was not–that Milton Friedman and the Monetarists asked so few questions about the validity of a monetary system in which money could be created at will by a small power elite, one completely unchecked by any regulatory process, or answerable in any way to the American people. The project he assigned himself was asking how the system worked, and where it had gone wrong. He did not ask the fundamental question: if the Federal Reserve had the power to create the Great Depression, why do we still entrust that power to bankd who benefit from that power?

Despite QE1 and QE2, we still have low interest rates. All along, I have been skeptical that we would see hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a way for governments to print their way out of fiscal trouble, over a relatively short period of time. Our government is not empowered to print money. A small cabal of banks is. And they don’t benefit from hyperinflation. Their seizure of our national wealth is a gradualistic enterprise, and they have NO interest in giving anyone any reason to look harder at it, at least at this point.

They benefited from the inflation in 1970’s that they seem to have caused very consciously by increasing the M1 supply (I have not studied this extensively, but that is my conclusion based on perhaps two hours research and an understanding of the system). They did this to get more power. Until 1980, if memory serves, their Open Market Operations were limited to the purchase of Treasury Bonds. A law was passed in 1979-80, as a “solution” to the stagflation facing the nation, which gave them the power to buy substantially any security, anywhere, with fiat money. They literally write the check, then own the security, where no money existed before they wrote the check. It also gave them control over most of the nations banks.

Keep in mind here that the Federal Reserve is OOMPOSED of banks, very large, mainly Wall Street banks, so it is the case that small banks are being regulated by their competitors, at least as I understand the matter.

What I am choosing to call primary inflation is the initial creation of money. Relative to Quantitative Easing, it is (we are told: we have no way of knowing for sure; the value of our money is quite literally beyond the reach of the democratic process) the purchase of Treasury bonds held by Reserve members with money created for the purpose.

What do they want to do with this money? Loan it to someone at interest. What is likely happening at this moment is that more optimistic economies around the world are borrowing that money. JP Morgan is making record profits. Why shouldn’t they? They play a role both in creating the money, and deciding who it goes to. They literally create money for themselves at the Federal Reserve, then make profits with it. If you ponder this for a moment it should become clear how monumentally stupid you have to be to go belly up once you are incorporated into this very cozy arrangement (think Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns).

If they loan it within the US, though, it goes into our fractional reserve banking system. In theory, the bsnk can loan out 90% of every dollar it borrows.

(How the money is borrowed, I don’t know. JP Morgan and others could buy up stock in the banks, or they could “overnight” the money using the Federal Funds system. How exactly they benefit from a 0% target, I also don’t know).

Anyway, a 10% reserve requirement means that they can “clone” the money theoretically in the vault, and send it back into circulation. Since it should have been in the vault, since it should not be travelling around, competing with other dollars, it is inflationary.

Let us assume confidence in the future [which would include a non-Socialist President, and fiscal responsibility in Washington, as well as repealing Obamacare, and many of the other regulations passed in recent years. These things would constitute a cessation of our downhill slide. They would not improve things, but rather stop them from getting worse. If your head hurts because you are banding it against the wall, step one in curing your headache is to stop banging your head.]: the dollar is borrowed by somone to build or buy something.

That one dollar created by the Fed and given to one of its members and sent out into the world to make its way is now $9. And that money gets loaned, say, to a builder, who puts it in his bank. He owes it to Bank one, but Bank two now has real money in his account. That bank now has 90% of the first dollar, and can now loan it out. So the money gets cloned again. 81 cents is created and sent out into the world.

And oh, it gets deposited, and Bank 3 can now loan out 73 cents.

This process I label Secondary Inflation. By far, this is the most important element of inflation. Over and above the monetary policies pursued by the Fed in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, the money supply will contract if nobody is borrowing money.

That is the condition we are in now. People are holding back. They are not borrowing money. So Bernanke’s Quantaitive Easing won’t even approach relevance until people start inflating our currency by borrowing again. What has happened, though, is that he has planted something like a trillion dollar seeds among very large private banks, who are poised to in effect seize large sections of our economy, when it recovers.

There is more I could say on this, but that will do for now.

Bon: not sure. Difficulty is the vinegar of life.

For me, I like vinegar. It is an essential element in ketchup and most salad dressings. It is in most barbeque sauces and of course all pickles.

How dull would life be if everything were sweet? We all need that kick in the ass from time to time.

If we figure out how to deliver that kick in the ass in conditions of peace and prosperity, then we have most of the problems of life solved.

Dale Carnegie once made the obvious point, that is not obvious to stupid people, that the only way to get people to do things is to make them want to do it. If you want sustained activity, you need sustained motivation.

You can point a gun at someone’s head–or that of someone they love–and get work out of them. The NVA regulars who terrorized the South Vietnamese countryside, extracting military service in exchange for not killing young mens families, were able to get work done. But the moment those same young men were able to, they threw them out of their villages. Supporting the natural resentment these villagers felt was the whole point and purpose of Creighton Abrams pacification strategy, which mercifully included many cases of shooting the sons of bitches outright. They richly deserved it.

Economics in large measure is the study of relative motivation. Why do people hire? Why do they work? Economics oriented in the real world understands the WIIFM principle: “What’s in it for me?” You can certainly appeal to people’s moral sensibilities, or their patriotism. But in the end you MUST appeal to something they value. Nothing is more enduring than the needs for security and safety, and those in turn are best met by making enough money for economic stability; through wealth building; through profit, in short.

There is an intrinsic difference between moral appeals “we can’t let the old go hungry”, and principles of sustainable economics.

Let us do a reductio ad absurdum. If it is morally good to take money from the present generation which we don’t have, and give it to people who paid in a fraction of what they are taking out, why not do even more of this? Rather than recognize that we can’t afford the system we have created, why not double down? After all, it is not like you can live comfortably (on your own, in a retirement home, far from the family that in past ages would have kept a room for you and cared for you) on Social Security. Why not double the payments? Would this not be morally right? Why not triple them? Why not quadruple them? Why shouldn’t every elderly person be granted $1 million dollars a year? After all, they are old, and it would comfort them.

Self evidently, this line of thought ignores economic realities. So too do those who benefit from panicking little old ladies in pursuit of economic policies that are designed in no small measure to protect political power, and NOT–categorically NOT–to actually help in a sustainable way the constituencies to which their loyalty is allegedly pledged.

Obama would actually be happy to see urban blight and misery spread. He can claim that this only proves that policies which lead to the creation of massive “poverty relief” organizations–with the massive, Democrat-voting taxpayer funded payrolls that go with them–haven’t gone far enough. Inner city blacks have been conditioned to believe that they are being helped with handouts and minimum wage laws, and can thus be tricked into supporting the very policies which ensure structural unemployment among them, and the corresponding inability for all but a few to rise above their conditions.

Poor people pay, as Thomas Sowell observed three decades ago.

What is needed is not mercy, and not compassion. What is needed is freedom. The more I learn, the more I realize that the only sustainable forms of business abuses are those sanctioned and protected by the government. We the People can sort out everything else on our own.

Would you rather not work at all, earn $600/month for doing nothing, or $800/month working at $5/hour, which is several dollars below the minimum wage? Some would choose the second, some the third, but given a choice, I don’t think anyone would choose the first.

Yet, that is where some 55% of young African American males are in this country at the moment. They are unemployed, and not having worked long enough to draw unemployment, are not able to earn any honest income at all. Small wonder many turn to drug dealing.

This article is illuminating, although of course the basic argument has been in place since at least the 1940’s, and ignored by the people who benefit from pretending they care about the poor.

Since minimum wage laws discriminate against the employment of the least-skilled worker, it shouldn’t be surprising to find 16-to-24-year-old male high school dropouts its primary victims.

Among the white males, the authors find that “each 10% increase in a state or federal minimum wage has decreased employment by 2.5% ; for Hispanic males, the figure is 1.2%.

“But among black males in this group, each 10% increase in the minimum wage decreased employment by 6.5%.”

How does this work? Wages are a function of supply and demand. This is obvious, but I have been pondering it again as I am listening to Thomas Sowell’s excellent “Basic Economics” on CD (educating yourself while driving is a good use of time).

When you enact minimum wage laws in areas with high unemployment, you get a lot more applicants for work than you have jobs. This means that the applicants get cherry-picked. If the owners are racists, this makes it easy to not hire African Americans.

Yet are unemployed people better off working for little, or not working, for nothing? What would you prefer?

Leftist idiots ASSume they know what is best, so they insist on “fair” wages, that have the effect of increasing systemic unemployment. Most seriously, they make it so that high school dropout kids can’t get jobs of any sort, to get the sort of experience needed to get better jobs, and eventually to rise up into the middle class. The whole process is short-circuited.

You see, employers hire people for what they are worth. If they hire people for more than market value, then they eventually suffer business losses and go bankrupt. And they CAN’T hire people for less than they are worth, since no one will take those positions.

It is quite clear that much of urban blight is due to Minimum Wage laws. They are great for those with jobs, at least relative to those who can’t get a job at all.

Yet the simple fact is that if wages were allowed to drop to their natural level, then jobs that are now going to the Developing World would stay here. There are very poor people in both the cities and countryside who would work for what people in other nations are working for. To be clear: they have NOTHING now. They might get in unemployment the same paltry amount they would have received working for $4/hour. But that money teaches them NOTHING, and makes them less employable in the future. It makes things worse.

So it is no surprise that as Minimum Wages increase, so too does umemployment, in a more or less linear fashion that is MOST damaging to poor blacks.