Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
On Chicago
Rush Limbaugh, for the second day in a row now, as I type this is addressing the minimum wage thing in Chicago by means of the Eighth Pillar of Persuasion which is the rhetorical question. His rhetorical question is that if the minimum wage is such a good idea, why stop at ten bucks? Why not twenty-five? Why not forty?
I find this to be persuasive, the way the Eighth Pillar is supposed to be. The power comes from the difficulty on the opposing side in composing a reasonable, cohesive answer. To say forty dollars an hour is somehow excessive, is to invite a fistful of other rhetorical questions, bound to be divisive amongst those who advocate minimum wages. Like…why ten and not forty? And…where is the line? And most damaging of all: If not forty, what are we afraid of when we stop short of forty? What’s the worst that would happen if we went ahead and did it?
That last one would be downright disruptive. The pro-minimum-wage guy who asserted the most reasonable of responses, “businesses wouldn’t want to hire people and they wouldn’t want to keep the people they already have,” would directly contradict the most outspoken among his bedfellows. Minimum wage isn’t supposed to have an effect on unemployment.
People cite statistical data to try to demonstrate the policy has little-to-no effect. This is silly, because when you examine it over the long term we don’t really raise the minimum wage. Not at the federal level, we don’t. We keep it in tight adherence to inflation, in fact, a point or two beneath that. This is by design, so the pro-minimum-wage people can continue to churn out studies that say it doesn’t have an effect.
Free of any political agenda, every honest economics expert is going to tell you when the price of a commodity goes up, people look for reasons not to buy it. Nothing has been advanced to logically assert the human commodity is any different.
You know what I find much more persuasive about Rush’s question, than the difficulty of his opposition in trying to answer it?
It’s the difficulty involved in turning it around.
Anti-minimum-wage people, not just Rush, ask the other side “Why not raise it to a zillion bucks an hour?” You don’t have to wait long for this point to be made. But very seldom do you hear a pro-minimum-wage person ask the opposite rhetorical question, “If you think it’s such a rotten idea, why not just get rid of it?”
You never hear that.
The anti-minimum-wage people would say, yup. Let’s go for it.
They know if it came to happen, the people who say the minimum wage is a lousy idea, would be proven right.
On the other hand, if the minimum wage is doubled — pointedly, that’s exactly what Chicago is doing — the people who say it’s a lousy idea, would again be proven right. Minimum wage is lent an appearance of credibility, through a careful sheltering from reality. It is only shown to maybe-not-suck, possibly, when & if it is kept more-or-less in nickel-for-nickel comportation with the inflation rate. Economists generally agree the minimum wage had the highest purchasing power in the late 1960’s.
Why not just get rid of it? Why, indeed. It’s a powerful question, made most powerful because it is carefully avoided by those who would be asking it — if they really believed in what they were saying.
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