The Right Lane update 8.06.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Why Minimum wage hurts the people it is intended to help  By Michael Busler
Many people around the country are calling on the federal government to raise the minimum wage from the current level of $7.25 per hour. Some believe the minimum wage should be at least $9 or $10 per hour, while in Washington D.C. the city council believes the minimum, at least for large retailers like Walmart, should be $12.50 per hour. In New York City the workers in the fast food industry believe the minimum should be $14.50. But is raising the minimum wage a good idea? Some argue that a worker being paid the minimum, cannot survive. At current levels, annual income of minimum wage workers would be about $15,000. This is barely above the poverty rate for an individual and far below the poverty rate for a family of four. So don't these people need more?

Although that argument appears valid, the reality is that the minimum wage hurts exactly the people it intends to help. That's because anytime a price (or wage) is set above the market equilibrium, surpluses result. A surplus of labor is called unemployment, which means that raising this wage causes unemployment. Let's look at why this occurs and the numbers that support the claim of higher unemployment.

If there were no minimum, the market would set the wage at the point where the quantity of labor supplied (people seeking jobs) would exactly equal the quantity of labor demanded (the number of jobs available) so that unemployment would be zero (except for some seasonality factors or some factors concerning people between jobs). Suppose the equilibrium wage would be $5 per hour. If that's the case, what happens when we set the minimum at $7.25 or higher?

At $5 let's say 100 people seek jobs and at $5 there are 100 jobs available. If we raise the wage to $7.25, more marginal workers (those who seek jobs but don't necessarily have to, like recent high school grads who could go on for more education) would enter the labor force increasing the quantity supplied to say 120. In addition, at a wage of $7.25 there would be fewer jobs available, say only 80 instead of 100. So that at the $7.25 wage we would have 120 people seeking 80 jobs resulting in a 33% unemployment rate.

There would be fewer jobs available because some workers simply aren't worth $7.25 per hour to the firm. If we look at the latest figures for the unemployment rate, this seems to be true. While it was recently announced that the overall unemployment rate is 7.4%, the rate for teenagers is almost 25%. The rate for minority teenagers in some inner cities is close to 50%. The rate for women entering the work force for the first time is over 20%. The minimum wage is hurting just the people it intends to help by causing very high unemployment rates.

But what about the argument that the workers "need" more? This is not a valid argument in our economy.

To show why this is the case, let's assume we have 100 workers who get together and produce 1000 units of output per day. At the end of the day it must be decided how to divide the output (which becomes the income of the worker). There are basically two ways to do this.

One is we can divide the output evenly so that each of the 100 workers receives 10 units, regardless of their contribution. The logic is that each person should be paid according to their need. And since each person has similar needs, they are paid the same. This system may have some success when the society is concerned with the lower level needs like food, shelter, clothing and safety, but the system fails in the long term since there is no incentive to work harder and produce more. No matter how hard an individual works their pay is the same. This is why the system failed in countries like Russia and China and is failing in countries like Cuba and North Korea, where the standard of living is extremely low

The second way, as we theoretically do in the U.S., is to pay an individual according to their contribution, so that someone who works hard, figures out how to improve the production process and makes a large contribution may earn 40 units of output, while a worker who barely contributes may earn only 2 or 3 units. This is not an equal distribution of output but rather an (arguably) fair distribution. In this system individuals are encouraged to produce more because their earnings will increase. This results in growth in the economy and vast improvements in the standard of living.

So the argument based on a worker needing more is not valid in our system because we are paid according to contribution and not according to need.

The bottom line is that increasing the minimum wage will hurt the people it is trying to help by reducing the number of jobs available, encouraging more people to skip further education and enter the job market and raising prices of products to consumers likely by a large amount, considering the rippling effect that higher minimum wages would cause on the entire wage structure.

The best policy is really to eliminate the minimum wage and let the market decide. Then an individual would know exactly what the value of their output was worth, unemployment would fall dramatically, growth in the economy would accelerate and there would be little wage induced inflation. Everyone would benefit.  - Michael Busler, Ph.D. is a public policy analyst and an Associate professor at Richard Stockton College.

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74% Rarely or Never Use Mass Transit

Most Americas seldom, if ever use mass transit, but they still tend to believe the government should back mass transit projects as long as they don’t lose money. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just six percent (6%) of American Adults use mass transit services such as buses, subways, trains or ferries every day or nearly every day. Seven percent (7%) use these services at least once a week. Four percent (4%) ride them two or three times a month, while another seven percent (7%) characterize their use as once every few months.

But three-out-of-four Americans (74%) say they rarely or never use mass transit.

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Democrats Own Obamacare, and Its Political Cost Keeps Rising by Michael Barone

Nothing is free in politics, but there is some question when you pay the price. That's been a saying of mine for many years, though I may have unconsciously plagiarized it from someone else. I think it applies to Obamacare. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Norman Ornstein has been shellacking Republicans for trying to undercut the implementation of the Obama health care legislation. He calls it "simply unacceptable, even contemptible."   He points out that Republicans in the past haven't tried to undercut or derail major legislation of this sort. That's correct, as a matter of history. You won't find any concerted drive to repeal and replace Social Security after it was enacted in 1935 or Medicare after it was passed in 1965. In contrast, Republicans proclaim they want to repeal and replace Obamacare.

They don't agree on tactics. Some Republicans want to vote to defund Obamacare spending while continuing to fund the government otherwise. Others argue that would be a futile gesture and politically damaging.

The two sides have taken to calling each other names -- the suicide caucus and the surrender caucus. But both want to get rid of Obamacare because they think it's bad for the country.  The so-called surrender caucus is surely correct in predicting that Barack Obama and the Democratic-majority Senate will never allow the defunding of Obamacare. The so-called suicide caucus is right to point out that government shutdowns are not fatal to congressional Republicans, who maintained their congressional majorities after the shutdowns in the Clinton years.

Other points are more problematic. The defunders argue that once Obamacare subsidies go out, people will get hooked on them and support for repeal will tank. Their critics argue that there may be so many glitches (Obama's word) in the rollout of the health insurance exchanges that support will fall below the present low levels. The fact is that no one knows for sure. But whatever happens, there are good reasons for Republicans to regard Obamacare as a legitimate target.

One is that, unlike Social Security and Medicare, the law was passed by Democrats only, with no bipartisan consultation. Democrats could do that only because accidents -- like the later overturned prosecution of Alaska Republican Ted Stevens -- gave them a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. That's a contrast with the 2003 Medicare Part D prescription drug bill, which as Ornstein points out Democrats didn't try to undercut after it was passed. But Democrats were widely consulted during the legislative process, and a non-trivial number of them voted for the final version. A second point is that Obamacare -- unlike Social Security, Medicare and Part D -- wasn't consistently supported in public opinion polls. Quite the contrary.

Please don't pass this bill, the public pleaded, speaking in January 2010 through the unlikely medium of the voters of the commonwealth of Massachusetts when they elected Republican Scott Brown to the Senate as the 41st vote against Obamacare. Democrats went ahead anyway, at the urging of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and with the approval of President Barack Obama. They made that decision knowing that, without a 60th vote in the Senate, the only legislative path forward was for the House to pass a bill identical to the one the Senate passed in December 2009.

No one had intended that to be the final version. Democrats expected to hold a conference committee to comb the glitches out of the Senate bill and the version the House passed in November. Voters had done all they could do to signal that they wanted not a Democratic version of Obamacare but a bipartisan compromise or no legislation at all. Obama and Pelosi ignored that demand. Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that Republicans -- politicians and voters -- regard the passage of the law as illegitimate. And that they believe they are morally justified in seeking repeal and replacement of legislation they consider gravely harmful to the nation.

You may or may not agree with those judgments. But it shouldn't be hard to see why Republicans feel that way. Those feelings have been intensified as glitch after glitch in Obamacare come to light -- and as the president indicates, contrary to his constitutional duty, that he will not faithfully execute parts of the law. When they passed Obamacare, Democrats thought they were achieving a triumph free of any cost. Now, as Obamacare founders, they are paying the price.

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. 

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Really Dumb Smart People: “Cows Are Bad.” by Gary North

This was sent by Franklin Sanders, “the money-changer.” He sells gold and silver coins, and runs a “gentleman’s farm” in his spare time.

Dumb comes in all sizes, and in all degrees of wealth. And when you get too smart, you fall all the way around the dial to “Hard Crab Stupid.” Against my better judgment, I watched a short video today with Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder who paid for the lab-grown hamburger I decried to y’all a few days ago. On the film was somebody from Harvard opining how good meat was for evolving humans, & how bad for the environment. Ditto the Dutch doctor who committed this lab-crime, and Brin. Dumb, dumb, dumb. These people don’t know sic ‘em from come here, nor do they have the sense God gave a screwdriver. Call me Luddite, I don’t care, I’ll call you deaf, blind, and dumb to the God-breathed glories of creation. In the first place, these self-lobotomized fools believe that cows are evil, cows pass too much gas, cows are messing up the environment. First, termites pass way more gas than cows. Second, the gas doesn’t harm a blessed thing anyway — global warming is warmed over global hogwash. Third, cows contribute far more to an ecosystem than they take out, IF they are left alone to be cows, fed on grass, as God designed them. Fourth, cattle-raising only becomes an ecological threat when done in cruel Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations — CAFOs — which, you guessed it, are the creation of the fascist government- corporation partnership that presently occupies America. Agribusiness is not farming: it is ANTI-farming. CAFOs are not animal husbandry or farming, they are an Enlightenment-reductionist attempt to industrialize biology & therefore doomed to fail & pollute while they make billions for corporations. I’ll bet each one of you a nickel that not one of the goofs on that video has ever pushed a forehead into a cow’s warm flank on a cold morning and grabbed a teat and heard that steaming milk hiss into the bucket. Or herded cows. Or stepped in cow manure. Or pulled a calf. Or loved an animal. No, a cow is an abstract to them, a cerebral concept, electrons in an agribusiness computer, and that PRECISELY is what’s wrong with the modern world. They don’t even know what a cow is, but they’re all ready to obsolete ‘em. Blind to worth, empty of love. If it was possible to emigrate to Mars, I’d do it so fast it’d make y’all’s heads spin. And take my cows with me.

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Achtung! Hitler-and-History Lies We’ve Been Told  By Stephanie Janiczek

For decades, even while he was in power, Adolf Hitler was attacked as a right-winger. Of course, his racism provoked that assessment as well as his militarism; however, when put to the test and proper study, what we have been taught and what we have been told by learned scholars is completely wrong. The obviousness of that fact is plain if one sits down and looks at the reality. Hitler was no free thinking, wild eyed individualist — he was a corporatist and a socialist.

First of all, we have him admitting his socialism. He doesn’t call Nazism by anything else other than National Socialism. Professors I know would be flipping their lids at me for daring to say what I am saying, but I knew they were lying when I was studying this. How could Hitler, who controlled Churches, Media, Schools, the Military, Health Care and everything else, be a right-winger? Was it because he was a racist? So, racism apparently makes a Nazi, or member of the National SOCIALIST German WORKER’S Party a right-winger? How convenient.

When I was in school, as in high school, I was always wondering why my teachers called Hitler right-wing. After learning about the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and then Communism, I was struck by similarities. When I asked about this issue, I was told well, they had similarities but really they were far different. That seemed convenient then and it makes zero sense now. Why, you ask? I’ll explain. Any form of government that controls healthcare, the economy, education and the news media is totalitarian by definition. And if the government controls the economy, either through out-right central control or through large scale corporations, they are socialist. Healthcare control is just a freebie because, if you control the economy, you by virtue of that will control health care. Nazi controlled Germany was all that. For an example, look at the Nazi euthanasia program: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005200

So, why would professors, high school teachers and so called learned scholars throw Adolf Hitler and his love of the worker, and controlling people’s lives even to whom they married, be so happy to throw him at us? I have a theory. It is not that complicated. Just follow my line of thinking.

Hitler and his minions wanted to control Germany. They said they were patriotic Germans. This lie helped them establish their credentials with the veterans of the First World War and conservatives who were looking to anyone to give Germany back her place in the world. The Communists were not patriotic.  Here’s the difference: the message. Hitler knew how the rank and file German folk felt about Germany and he used it. His later rantings, as Berlin was being razed to the ground and his empire was reduced to a city block, proves that he was no more a German Patriot than any Communist his brown shirts killed. In other words, Hitler used patriotism to get power. There is a lot more to be said about this subject but there’s no space here to talk about it. Hitler was able to harness the German’s love of discipline for his efforts. The Germans were very easy to seduce. Now think about this: almost 15 years of staggering, mind-boggling inflation, lawlessness and amorality and here’s this small man with a small mustache going on about law and order and morality. In reality, he was no more law-abiding or worried about morals than the people he wanted to destroy, the Communists. He used the German fear of Communism to shove National Socialism down the Germans’ throats and they didn’t realize it. It was a choice between two versions of Lucifer and they had no idea because they were so brow beaten and done.

So were Adolf Hitler and his minion’s right-wingers? When I think of “right-wing” I think of Libertarians, no centralized government. People governing themselves. I don’t think of an institution of any kind save for a military to protect interests, borders etc. I don’t think of institutionalized racism, forced euthanasia, forced military service, and zero free press. How is any of that “right-wing”?

Is merely calling Hitler a right-winger a sales pitch to sell the same thing he was selling? Did these leftist educators have to make Hitler look like a Republican, a rugged individualist, in order to sell what he sold? Think about it. I asked that question when I was a sophomore in high school. My Dad agreed with me, of course. HE was the person who taught me to ask questions that began with “yeah”, “but” and “why”. The more I asked, as I grew older, the angrier the response was. When I was a senior in college I realized how much I’d been lied to. Hitler, for all of the garbage I’d been told, was actually one of THEM. And what’s worse they knew it. They know it still.

It is time for some honesty about history. It’s time for the facts. Adolf Hitler was a left-wing socialist. Just because he called himself a National Socialist does not make the facts untrue. He was a corporate fascist socialist. Now I can hear the leftist scholars freaking out at this fact. He would not have been able to control Germany without the help of large corporate entities. He did not go to the conservatives for money. Outward support and for tea and sympathy, yes, but for real support he ran to Krupp, Thiessen and the rest. Because, unlike other socialists, he knew you can’t go anywhere without money. He followed Mussolini’s lead. A socialist with the veneer of a corporatist. And that, my dears, is a fascist and that is also a kind of leftist socialist.  

Facts are what they are. History is an undeniable force. She is strong in her ways and all consuming. She’s about the facts. It is time, when we talk about Germany and its bizarre experiment with National Socialism, to have those facts. Nazism is socialism splashed with corporate support on steroids and that is a fact. That is history.

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Busybody Politics  By Thomas Sowell

It is hard to read a newspaper, or watch a television newscast, without encountering someone who has come up with a new "solution" to society's "problems." Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions. San Francisco and New York are both plagued with large "homeless" populations today, largely as a result of previous housing "reforms" that made housing more expensive, and severely limited how much housing, and of what kind, could be built. The solution? Spend more of the taxpayers' money making homelessness a viable lifestyle for more people.

Education is a field with endless reforms, creating endless problems, requiring endless solutions. One of the invincible fallacies among educators is that all sorts of children can be educated in the same classroom. Not just children of different races, but children of different abilities, languages, and values. Isn't it nice to think so? I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination, rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with. The result is that many very bright children are bored to the point of becoming behavior problems, when the school work is slowed to a pace within the range of students who are slower learners. By federal law, even children with severe mental or emotional problems must be "mainstreamed" into classes for other students — often in disregard of how much this disrupts these classes and sacrifices the education of the other children.

Parents who complain about the effect of these "solutions" on their own children's education are made to feel guilty for not being more "understanding" about the problems of handicapped students. Nothing is easier for third party busybodies than being "understanding" and "compassionate" at someone else's expense — especially if the busybodies have their own children in private schools, as so many public school educators do. Whether in housing, education or innumerable other aspects of life, the key to busybody politics, and its endlessly imposed "solutions," is that third parties pay no price for being wrong. This not only presents opportunities for the busybodies to engage in moral preening, but also to flatter themselves that they know better what is good for other people than these other people know for themselves.

Right now, there are people inside and outside of government who are proposing new restrictions on how you may or may not visit the national parks that your taxes support. Among their proposals is doing away with trash cans in these parks, so that visitors have to take their trash out with them. Just how they would enforce this, when millions of people are visiting places like Yosemite or Yellowstone, is something the busybodies need not bother to think through — much less pay a price, when trash simply accumulates in these parks after trash cans are removed.

ObamaCare is perhaps the ultimate in busybody politics. People who have never even run a drugstore, much less a hospital, blithely prescribe what must be done by the entire medical system, from doctors to hospitals to producers of pharmaceutical drugs to health insurance companies. This includes federal laws requiring the turning over of patients' confidential medical records to the federal government, where these records can be looked at by politicians, bureaucrats and whoever can hack into the government's computers. Neither you nor your doctor has a right to keep this information confidential. What could lead anyone to believe that they have either the right or the omniscience to dictate to hundreds of millions of other people? Our educational system may have something to do with that, with their constant promotion of "self-esteem," and especially their emphasis on developing "leaders." Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. The price of their self-indulgence is the sacrifice of our freedom. If we don't defend ourselves against them, who will?

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Obama “Accidentally” Armed Terrorists Who Attacked Benghazi 

Sometimes, understanding the full political story requires taking a step back and connecting news stories in a way that the mainstream media “forgets” or outright refuses to do. Benghazi is one such example. We know for a fact that Obama helped arm the Libyan rebels in 2011, we know that an Al Qaeda group claimed they were being helped by the arms, we know that the New York Times admitted that they were being armed “accidentally”, and we know that that same group later attacked the US Benghazi consulate in 2012. What does this mean? Obama dumped weapons into Libya that Al Qaeda ended up receiving. This might be part of what Obama is hiding… his “go ahead” is what armed the anti-Benghazi terrorists. This puts a whole new spin on “aiding and abetting” the enemy.

Let’s go through these points with outside sources. First, Obama armed Libyan rebels.

From Reuters:

President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, government officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

But “support” can mean many things. What kind of support was he giving? We found out later on… weapons.

From the New York Times:

The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.

Just how bad was this “accidental” support? Enough that a leader of “Al Aqaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” openly admitted to being a main beneficiary.

From ABC News:

“We have been one of the main beneficiaries of the revolutions in the Arab world,” Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a leader of the north Africa-based al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [AQIM], told the Mauritanian news agency ANI Wednesday. “As for our benefiting from the [Libyan] weapons, this is a natural thing in these kinds of circumstances.”

Now who is this Al Qaeda group? They’re the ones who took part in the Benghazi attack. What source do we have for this? Hillary Clinton herself.

From the Miami Herald:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday tied the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya to the creation of an al Qaida haven in Mali, adding that Islamist militants there pose a threat to democratic transitions throughout northern Africa… ‘For some time, al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and other groups have launched attacks and kidnappings from northern Mali into neighboring countries,” Clinton told leaders at a U.N. meeting on North Africa’s political and security crises.’

The end conclusion is clear. The US dumped weapons in Libya, Al Qaeda took them, and that same group attacked Benghazi a year later.  The media refuses to point out what even Clinton herself has admitted. If this doesn’t prove media bias, nothing does. Meanwhile, we’re planning on repeating the entire ordeal in Syria. This truly is madness.

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"The good Education of Youth has been esteemed by wise Men in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happiness both of private Families and of Common-wealths. Almost all Governments have therefore made it a principal Object of their Attention, to establish and endow with proper Revenues, such Seminaries of Learning, as might supply the succeeding Age with Men qualified to serve the Publick with Honour to themselves, and to their Country." --Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, 1749

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