The US minimum wage recently rose again. The US government forces all people to use at least this minimum wage for employment compensation. This is regardless of what the employee and employer would have otherwise agreed to in the free market.

Supporters naively champion increases in the minimum wage as help for the poor. Summed up in the adage “let’s make the minimum wage $1000/hr, then we’d all be rich,” minimum wage laws attempt to achieve a fantasy.

More important than the number of dollars in one’s pocket is the buying power of those dollars. When a loaf of bread costs $300, $200 is not much money.

Yet many minimum wage supporters expect the poor’s buying power to increase while ignoring the increased costs of all goods and services that result from forcing the minimum wage upon all wealth creating businesses. After the market prices stabilize after a minimum wage increase, the poor are in the same position as before, but instead of paying $1.50 for a loaf of bread, they pay $2.00.

Their buying power is unchanged. The only effect of the minimum wage is to reduce the buying power of those who are not poor (i.e., those who create more wealth and/or spend less of their earnings).

This should be so obvious to adults, especially to politicians, that their motive must not be to help the poor but to attack anyone who creates wealth.

Socialists tend to not look at real wealth and quality of life improvements, but at relative wealth. They would rather force squalor upon all wealth creators than to allow the quality of life of all people to improve proportional to their productivity.

The minimum wage law should be recognized for the fraud that it is.

I occasionally listen to Leo Laporte’s technology shows. On today’s AM radio show, he ranted about the injustice of the RIAA success in enforcing “small web radio stations” to pay royalties for songs they play. He labeled the RIAA “greedy” and slammed them for not allowing “freedom” for web radio–essentially causing the Internet radio stations to shut down because they’d not be able to afford the royalties. He then cited an anecdotal reference to an actual musician who claims to want his music to be freely distributed without payment.

This stance is purely Marxist and is a blatant ploy to smash and grab the unearned.

“Free” Internet radio exists by offering value in exchange for web visits and traffic and exposure to advertisements. The value that these “free” Internet radio sites offer is music that they did not create, did not commission, and did not pay for. Yet, somehow, they believe it’s morally right to reap the benefits of using this unearned value. Even if these people choose to pay the operating costs without income from advertising, they are still giving away the unearned.

In exchange for creating music, the recording business has offered musicians wealth and perhaps fame. The recording business takes on the marketing, production, risk and all the other costs associated with selling music to the public. Most music that people enjoy has been a result of marketing by the recording industry–they get the music in to the ears of the public by radio play, organizing concerts and producing polished CDs. The demand that the public has for listening to most music comes from the recording industry.

Left to their own devices, musicians would generally reach very few people. If it weren’t for the gamble of the recording industry, they would offer their few customers relatively shabby products.

Generally, the recording industry pays the musicians for their music. The musicians agree to sell the rights to their music in exchange for a lump sum payment and many times, royalties. They have sold the music that they created to the recording company. So the musician that Leo says wants his music to be given out for free doesn’t mention that he has sold the songs long ago.

Leo also doesn’t fault the greed of the free web radio operators who get advertising income for giving out others’ products. The popularized version of a Marxist premise is “everyone who makes more than I do is greedy.”

While the RIAA has endorsed some intrusive methods to protect its products from mass theft and has not offered convenient transactions in the digital world, everyone should recognize what the facts of the relationships are, and recognize the right for a company to own music as a result of voluntary free trade with musicians. Those who wish to steal music that was originally sampled freely on commercial radio should be treated like the thieves they are.

I’m not certain how long this has been the case, but apparently, news reporters are now stating in the tone of factual reporting that humans are causing global warming. In one article I read about the doomsday report from a “union of concern scientists,” AP writer Angela Delli Santi states “The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gasoline, are a leading cause of the heating of the planet, known as global warming.”

Possibly, this reporter believes that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a fact beyond question. It would be important to ask her why she believes this to understand how this hysteria is spreading throughout the pop culture. Another possibility is that she wants her readers to believe that AGW is a fact beyond question.

Reality doesn’t care what people believe, it keeps on behaving according to its identity or nature. What does matter is a how human belief affects everyone’s political freedoms and individual rights. When the Christians were acting in accordance with the “fact” of their god’s wishes during the dark ages, there was tyranny and misery with little advancement in technology. Witches were burned at the stake for mystically hurting others. Today, those clamoring for power or envious of the unprecedented success and wealth of the free market seek to force people to submit to the “fact” of AGW.

There is little appeal to science and reason, and those politicians who choose to cite scientific studies (e.g., Al Gore) pick and choose those papers that support their agenda while shamelessly ignoring papers that blatantly contradict the entire premise of AGW. They are not interested in knowing reality, but rather the conquest of humanity. After all, environmentalists operate on the premise that humans are innately evil because of their ability to create more wealth than primates. Interestingly, this is not too different from the Christian belief in original sin. 
 
Unfortunately these days, humans have increasingly fewer supporters. The political culture will progressively reflect this trend.

With Southern California grocery workers planning to strike soon, I thought it an appropriate time to review the state of the unions and their role in the economy. Essentially, modern unions use political pull and extortion to get the unearned.

Summarized in their slogan “live better, work union,” union bosses lure new recruits by offering unearned wages in exchange for dues. They know the value of votes in our unfettered democracy, and seek to stockpile them for use as ammunition against others. Historically, unions have successfully infiltrated US laws through their political activities. Although many of these laws have weakened since their heyday, businesses are still forced to respect union extortions and treat them like valid and lawful requests.

For their part, unions only offer more extortion. Instead of seeking to improve their value, union members choose to gouge employers. Instead of using union dues to create competing businesses, they choose to invest in political pull to help force more unearned money from businesses. While businesses must constantly adjust their tactics to stay profitable in changing markets, unions seek to shield themselves from changing labor markets and force businesses to handle all of the risks.

Essentially, the union credo is “we want more money, and we’re going to destroy the business (and our own jobs) to get it.” Government unions are much worse in this respect. Their parasitic hosts are not businesses, but rather all taxpayers who don’t have a choice to shop elsewhere.

Properly, in a free market, people are compensated according to the value that they create. This is why engineers and architects are compensated more than janitors.

An engineer with a broom can sweep a room, but a janitor with an aircraft wing will produce disaster. A janitor with a broom can sweep a room, but an engineer with an aircraft wing can help quickly transport people and products to the far reaches of the world.

In spite of the obvious difference in value, the established compensation is still a wonderful property of the free market that achieves the maximum efficiency. Just like movie tickets cost whatever most people are willing to pay for them, employees should be compensated according to what salary other people are willing to do the work for. If a dozen people are willing to sweep a room for $10, it would be inefficient and wasteful to pay another person $20 for the same job. Likewise, if very few are willing or able to sweep a room for $10, then the market price increases to the proper level. Furthermore, if janitor Jimmy creates a way to sweep a room in half the time, he can charge $9 and still be more profitable than the others.

I worked at several smaller grocery and retail stores in my late teens. It was essentially unskilled manual labor requiring basic skills that anyone could do. Now with labor saving devices like laser barcode scanners and self-checkout aisles, the skills needed from today’s grocery store workers should be less, not more.

In the coming weeks, the liberal media will certainly run “balanced” stories about poor grocery workers who claim that they need more money to support their lifestyles (especially their hungry children) while grocery executives and stockholders are accused of greed for their large compensations. No reporter will ask grocery workers if they can make a business profitable in the free market while navigating countless laws and regulations. Instead, union bosses will be on camera screaming Marxist slogans to help maintain their worthless political pull.

Please treat these people and their ideas accordingly.

Politician Al Gore continues his war against humanity this weekend by organizing “Live Earth” music concerts to promote his totalitarian agenda without the need for rational argument. It can be safely assumed that virtually nobody attending these concerts understands the science (or lack of science) behind the IPCC’s fantastic claims.

However, these concerts will likely prove successful because, in part, (a) young people are taught by teacher’s unions that reason is not necessary to live, (b) those wishing to behave morally for the first time will latch on to this, or any, self-sacrificial hysteria, (c) young people are highly impressionable by music (when I was a child, I though that Iron Maiden was a way of life).

Even though the climate has always been changing, and there are countless studies that refute claims that humans are affecting the climate, politicians continue to trumpet a new socialist/fascist/communist/totalitarian world in which government power structures control the lives of all in the name of all that is not human.

It’s not difficult to understand why politicians seeking more power love environmentalism.

Like most government holidays, most people will celebrate US Independence Day with leisure activities as though it was any other day off of work. Ostensibly, the day has been set aside to celebrate the existence of the US on the anniversary of its birth.

However, as displayed in the daily headlines, people are increasingly confused and apathetic about the significance and virtue of the USA. To some people, freedom means the ability to create wealth in an inspiring way while keeping the results. To others, freedom means the ability to force their neighbors to work for their medical bills. Still others curse the US government for not endlessly stealing the wealth of its citizens to give to foreign dictatorial regimes.

So with US flags on display all around the country this week, it’s clear that there’s a critical disparity about the essence of the USA.

The USA was the first government in modern history to explicitly declare that no individuals have the right to enslave others. At a time of divine kings, dictators and tribal warlords, this was radical. Although it would take more time, and a civil war, to fully stamp out slavery in the free world (slavery is still widely practiced today), the USA set the standard of freedom.

With some exceptions, the freedoms in the modern USA have eroded with the tyranny of the majority taking increasing precedence over the protection of the individuals (helped along by demagogue politicians working to manipulate and control the tyrannical majority). US citizens are also told that foreign theocratic dictators have a right to repeatedly threaten and attack us lest our military causes a bloody child to appear on CNN.

Regardless of some US foreign policy blunders, let us not forget that the freedoms and prosperity enjoyed in the US as a result of the historical respect for individual rights does not remotely compare to the government-forced religious tyrannies spread through most of the middle-east and Africa. Our freedoms also do not compare to any secular government treating its citizens as slaves to be sacrificed in a socialist experiment.

Although generations of ivory-tower philosophers and leftist hippies have been preaching, “we’re no better,” let’s not forget the unique and essential strength of the USA: The respect and defense of all individuals, and the resulting, unprecedented wealth. That, its causes, and its defense is what we should be celebrating on July 4th.

The purpose of a war is to attain victory—to eliminate the enemy’s capacity to do harm and/or eliminate the enemy altogether. The military activity that George W. Bush has ordered is not a war, yet the media keeps using the phrase “War in Iraq” or “Iraq War.”

Currently, the US military in Iraq is serving as cannon fodder for people who have no conception of individual rights. The Iraqi version of democracy would include voting for the enslavement of the opposing tribe/party, and for the death of all non-Muslims infidels. While the US military is bogged down in an endless pipe-dream mission in Iraq, the higher-level criminals in Iran are allowed to continue to build military might for a true nuclear holocaust. This is no war.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the US military has flailed about not in a campaign to eliminate Islamic theocracy in the world, but to at least “do something” in response to foreign attack. Instead of engaging in politically correct “operations” while telling those in the free world to remove the liquids from their baggage, the US should use its superior military to remove the world’s theocratic governments from existence (much like the full surrender of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in World War II). That, and only that, would be a war worthy of winning.