Category Archives: culture

Minimum Wage and Morality

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Seattle has passed an ordinance that will raise the minimum wage private businesses in the city must pay to $15/hr. The wage increase will take effect in stages over a few years, starting next April. I’ve written elsewhere (here, for instance, and here) on the economic utility of raising the minimum wage.

What about what a government-imposed minimum wage does to a worker’s morality? A Seattle home health worker earning $10.95/hr had this to say about her situation and Seattle’s minimum wage mandate, as summarized at the first link, and also quoted there:

[She] is looking forward to the way a higher wage will help her support her three children.

She said she and her three kids are living with her brother because she can’t afford an apartment of her own even though she works full time. “This will make changes to myself and also a lot of other people in my shoes.”

She says that like family taking care of family is a bad thing. But why shouldn’t family take care of family first, rather than strangers being forced to do so ahead of family? Plainly, this family does not need the outside help; they just find it…convenient.

The Meaning of the Recent European Union Parliamentary Elections

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Spiegel Online International wrote earlier in the week about the EU’s parliamentary elections. From those elections, there could be a power shift away from the European Council, made up of the heads of the EU member nations, toward the European Parliament, made up of Members of the European Parliament elected by the citizens of the member nations.

This power shift is possible because of two things: one is that the citizens cast their votes for their MEPs based in large part on dissatisfaction with the EU leadership in what in the US would be the Executive Branch—including the European Commission President—with the proximate outcome of a large increase in the number of MEPs representing various euro-skeptic parties at the direct expense of the pro-EU parties.

The other is that these citizens, through their new MEPs, now want their say on who their next Commission President should be, and they have a clear preference. However, the Commission, the traditional determiner of the President with the EU Parliament simply rubber stamping the choice, want to retain that decision, and they want someone else.

That’s a long introduction with which to get to the point of this post. The IOS had this to say, in part, on the matter:

[I]n many countries, the vote’s outcome was more a reflection of domestic political frustrations than a broader statement on European issues.

That, though, is the nature of federations. The constituent states vote their individual interests as determined by the citizens of those states, by design, and compromises among those states’ MEP contingents occur, to be implicitly ratified or rejected by the states’ citizens in the next round of MEP elections—Adam Smith in the political world.

As long as the EU continues to not understand that simple fact, it always will be fraught with the sorts of economic and political failures it has experienced—and still is experiencing— every time there’s even a minor crisis in politics or economics.

It appears as though the misunderstanding will continue for a long and dangerous time.

It comes down to who, in the end, is responsible for choosing the next head of the Commission, a body of 33,000 employees that is in charge of proposing new legislation and monitoring compliance with EU treaties. Is it up to the voters? Or up to the governments of EU member states?

New Publications

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I’m pleased to announce two new pamphlets, A Conservative’s Thoughts on Rights and Duties, their Duality, and some Implications and A 21st Century American Crisis.

In Rights and Duties I talk about our inalienable rights and our inalienable duties and their attributes as endowments from and by our Creator, as well as how they and the fact that they’re duals of each other, are a part of the fabric of our existence—both as those individual rights and duties and in the capacity of those duals.

Further, and just as importantly, our inalienable rights and our inalienable duties are in each of us as individuals; they are not in groups of us, they are not in the whole of us as a nation. Each one of us is possessed of them entirely in ourselves.

This, of course, has implications for the role our government, and especially the roles of “civil law” and “civil rights,” have in our lives.

American Crisis is a call to arms for all of us to become active and to rescue our Republic from its dangerous drift away from our founding principles of small, limited government; individual liberties; personal responsibilities.

From the pamphlet:

In the era of our War of Independence, governments, said the Conservatives of the time—those monarchists, forerunners of today’s Big Government Progressive disciples—exist first and above the people, and the rights of the people are those granted by these governments.

“The time’s Liberals, though—the men and women of our War, of our Founding, and of our earlier history—had a different view. A man, they held, has rights that are indivisible from him because they are inherent in his humanity, in his very existence, as endowments from his Creator. Government, they held, exists to protect these rights and for no other purpose.

And

The blows we struck in 2010 were a worthy start, but they were only a start. The progress we added in 2012 has been inadequate to our cause. But we are not finished. Wisdom is not the purchase of a day.

See the links to the right or my Books page for information about how to get them in either Kindle or epub (Nook-compatible) format.

I hope you get as much out of them as I enjoyed putting into them.

Universities and “Free” Speech

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From the Volokh Conspiracy, via The Washington Post.

In a then-latest in a long line of speech intolerance in the name of tolerance (is this what they’re teaching in these institutions of “higher” “education” these days?), ex-Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, chose to withdraw from giving the commencement speech at Haverford this spring (just what do these pupils think they’re commencing on receipt of their parchments of achievement?). A loud minority of pupils and putative professors objected to Birgeneau’s use of police to break up an Occupy protest while he was at Berkeley, on the odd theory that it’s somehow inappropriate to enforce laws and regulations on college campuses.

Birgeneau’s replacement speaker wasn’t shy about this PC nonsense, however.

Ex-Princeton President William Bowen had this to say on speech “correctness” during the course of his commencement address at Haverford:

I am disappointed that those who wanted to criticize Birgeneau’s handling of events at Berkeley chose to send him such an intemperate list of “demands,” said Bowen, who led Princeton from 1972 to 1988 and last year received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. “In my view, they should have encouraged him to come and engage in a genuine discussion, not to come, tail between his legs, to respond to an indictment that a self-chosen jury had reached without hearing counter-arguments.”

And

In keeping with the views of many others in higher education, I regard this outcome [the withdrawal of Birgeneau from the commencement address] as a defeat, pure and simple, for Haverford—no victory for anyone who believes, as I think most of us do, in both openness to many points of view and mutual respect.

What he said.

Either we’re a nation whose citizens are free to speak, and where we are free to choose for ourselves to what speech we will listen, or we’re a nation whose citizens are free to speak and to hear only those messages that have been approved for us by our Betters. There is nothing in between.