To Plundering Politicians: Get Off Our Backs!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

A blurb from Turning Point USA points out the irony that Elizabeth Warren is agitating for a $22/hour minimum wage-- but doesn't pay her interns.

Whether Elizabeth Warren pays her interns or not, support for the minimum wage can only come from a dizzy, feel-good ignorance of the law of supply and demand. 

So if $22/hour is such a good thing, why not $100/hour?  Or how about $1,000/hour?  Why not? 

A minimum wage hurts the very people it is designed to help-- and hurts them worse than anybody else because it makes many unskilled workers unemployable for a first job. If some workers are so unskilled that they can't produce more wealth than their pay, an employer will not hire them. Without such a first job, the unskilled may never get a leg up into the workforce and learn better skills that can lead to their advancement. To be sustainable, workers' pay can never be greater than a fraction of the revenue they are able to generate for their employer. To an employer, workers' pay is just another factor of production, like steel or wheat or energy, and these companies have to compete with each other to attract and keep workers. 

Unbeknownst to Elizabeth Warren, this competition for workers is what explains why 97 percent of the workforce earns more than the minimum wage! And it's not labor unions which goose up the pay for most workers because, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the portion of the workforce belonging to unions in 2016 was barely 11 percent, down from 17 percent in 1983, and down from its peak of 28.3 percent in 1954. (As a telling footnote here, in 2016, the percentage of union workers in the private sector was 6.7 percent, and in the public sector it was 35.3 percent.) 

Warren and her ilk are infected by the ridiculous politics of unwarranted, unearned self-congratulation for how good they feel about their well-intended policies, no matter how badly these policies play out in the real world.

Still worse than their being oblivious to the actual results of their policies, they display a feckless contempt for the legitimate rights of individuals to their own life, liberty, and property.

They support so-called rights to all kinds of goods and services which do not grow on trees and the provision of which will have to be taken from others whose willingness to cough up the goods is deemed irrelevant.  "We're all in this together," so it's a good thing to "spread the wealth around," as President Obama once put it on the campaign trail. Never mind just how this spreading around is to be done.

Warren et al are infected by the idea of economic egalitarianism--not political equality, not the equal treatment of all before the law, but equality of income and wealth, which could never happen unless the government or the mafia were willing to rob Peter to pay Paul. 

On this point, see Don Watkins and Yaron Brook's fabulous books Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, and Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government.  Those of Warren's mind believe that they know better than we how to run our lives, so they are happy to grab the reins of our lives.  They do not want a government of laws so much as they want a government of Lords (to lord it over us.)  

Let us get this straight: there is no equality among individuals!  It is a destructive delusion to believe otherwise.  We are each unique and irreplaceable in our attributes!  There can be no such equality in the real world!  We differ from each other in every way-- we are unequally endowed in health, intelligence, ambition, the circumstances of our birth.  Moreover, it is this inevitably rainbow panoply of traits that makes the world go around--these differences of gifts and tastes offer the basis for trading to mutual benefit.  One person's trash is another's treasure.  When we are free to deal with each other voluntarily, the outcome in wealth can never be equal, but this freedom to trade with each other without government interference is the road to optimizing the creation of a rising tide of wealth that will lift more of the boats than any other policy.  This freedom is the very basis for any possibility for true cooperation between people and the coordination and direction of all the resources in the world.  Government regulation of these matters usurps the choices of the people.

Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education often said that government is like a clenched fist.  Government is force.  The role of government should be strictly confined to those areas where a fist can be effective, such as a police force to restrain domestic predators and a military to protect us from foreign aggression.  A fist is incapable of shaking hands or writing a symphony or stroking a crying baby.  Everything apart from wielding protective force in accordance with a rigorous policy of protecting the rights of every peaceful individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, should be left to the citizens' discretion.     

Liberals don't understand that government has no funds of its own. Every dollar government has comes from the citizens, and if we do not cheerfully hand it over to them, they take these funds out of our hides by force.  

If you say that I am mistaken here because the government can create its own money through the printing press, let me remind you that such fiat money dilutes the value of the existing currency and therefore destroys the value of the money we hold as private citizens.  In other words, this phony-baloney printing press money is no different in its effect on us than if the government were simply to steal our money outright. Printing-press money is no different from just another tax on us.  

Liberals truly fail to understand that the root of all evil in the world is the willingness to use other people against their will. Every despicable practice of humans is an example of this concept, if you think about it. 

What else is murder but the willingness to use another against his will? Rape? It's another example of using others against their will. Slavery? Genocide? Theft, fraud--you name it! All of these are examples of using others against their will.

But this willingness to use others against their will is the soul of the "progressive" ... and of sundry others as well... they are political predators, whether they know it or not.

I say learn to live and let live! And lend a helping hand, if you can do so by your own lights and in a way that you believe will actually do any good.

Ms. Warren, you need to learn that making the world a better place will most effectively begin if we each take full responsibility for ourselves, and embrace the challenge of unfolding our gifts in a way that allows us to offer others something that they will value enough to pay us for it. As Ayn Rand formulated it, we should live by the trader principle, voluntarily exchanging values for mutual benefit.

Where, through no fault of their own, some others cannot take care of themselves, help should come to them voluntarily from others who lend a helping hand out of the benevolence of a heart made full perhaps by the gratitude we may come to feel from having achieved a good life.  The situation of the helpless is morally compromised by any aid that comes to them as loot plundered by a welfare state.  Such plunder has the perversely unintended consequence of transforming the goodness of voluntary aid that is given to the helpless as charity, and turns this goodwill into a policy that poisons the relationship between citizens.  Where aid comes as loot taken by force from some citizens and given to others, anyone who owns anything is encouraged to look upon other citizens as a potential threat, not a potential benefit.

Frederic Bastiat captured the nature of this relationship between citizens and governments when he wrote, "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." And then he pointed out the inevitable consequence of this attitude: "Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone."

To Elizabeth Warren and all the rest of you like-minded predators, I say get off our backs!  Get a life!  Get a life of your own and produce something of real value that others will voluntarily want to trade with you (as opposed to your politics of “trading” our money for our life.)  

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2017.0509

c. 1,490 words