| | Jack Lord wrote, Actually there have been a number of studies that have shown no adverse impact from the minimum wage and that it has made the difference between getting a leg up and not for many workers. Jack, if it's not too much trouble, perhaps you wouldn't mind addressing my arguments, rather than simply citing "a number of studies that have shown no adverse impact from the minimum wage." Anyone can quote "studies" that purport to defend his or her point of view. The question that always arises is, were the studies sound or were they flawed? The well-known Card and Krueger study is a case in point. There were a number of flaws in that study that discredited it. Moreover, empirical evidence claiming to prove a particular point has to be consistent with the rest of our knowledge in order to be accepted at face value. Any study that purports to invalidate the well-established first law of demand (even if only by implication) is highly suspect. As Carl Sagan was fond of saying, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You market fundies might want to take a look at Robert Kuttner's Everything For Sale, in which he discusses where he sees markets working and where he doesn't. Jack, there are no dearth of books purporting to demonstrate market failure, which today passes for the conventional wisdom. Objectivist and libertarian economists are well aware of them, and have addressed the objections before. I would gladly recapitulate them here, but space is obviously a factor. If anything needs to be focused on and given one's attention today, it is the case for laissez-faire capitalism, not the case against it. You know that as well as I do. We are fighting an uphill battle, because our ideas are scarcely the mainstream view. The idea that every working relationship is voluntary and nonexploitative because the alternative is starvation is nonsense. Who said that? Certainly not I. It is virtually never the case that the alternative to a particular job is starvation, as there are invariably alternative employment opportunities. But it is true that if the employer chooses to hire a job applicant and the applicant chooses to accept the job, then the employment relation is voluntary. It is also non-exploitative in the sense that the employer is offering the worker a value that the employer is not otherwise obligated to provide, just as the worker is offering the employer a value that the worker is not otherwise obligated to provide. They are engaging in a voluntary trade by mutual consent to mutual advantage. After all, if the employer has no moral obligation to hire the worker, which he certainly does not, then his hiring him at a mutually agreed upon wage cannot be viewed as immoral, nor therefore as exploitation. If you haven't expereinced serous discrimination as a disabled or older person or person of color or gender discrimination, then frankly your opinion that it doesn't exist is meaningless. I don't think this follows. It certainly wouldn't follow that unless I've experienced serious discrimination, I cannot say that it doesn't exist, for if I experienced it, then I would have to say it exists. So, if I take you literally, your statement is a non-sequitur. Evidently, what you intended to say is that unless a person has experienced serious discrimination, he cannot have an opinion on it. But if that were true, it would mean that a person who had experienced no discrimination could not condemn it. Is that what you believe? There are groups like the Center for Budget Priorities that actually have made studies that point to serious failings in the market and of GOP governmental policies. Here we go again with the "studies," as if the groups that conduct them have no agenda, and can be viewed as entirely unbiased and infallibly trustworthy. The various Civil Rights Laws in employment, housing, public accomodations, etc. would not have had to been enacted if the market was taking care of everything, obviously it isn't. Once again, while discrimination can certainly exist, the incentives are against it, because it is costly to the business that practices it. The reason that blacks were so heavily discriminated against prior to the enactment of the civil rights laws was the fact that previous laws forced businesses to practice discrimination. Merchants were required by law to have separate bathrooms, separate dining areas, separate drinking fountains, etc. This kind of segregation would not have existed in the absence of these regulations, which increased the costs of doing businesses. In this respect, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a blessing to most businesses, because it freed them from the necessity to discriminate against their customers. Given a chance, these businesses would have desegregated voluntarily, not because they were exceptionally fair-minded, but simply because racial segregation is unprofitable. It is less profitable to hire by race than by ability, and in a free market, it is economic suicide to alienate an entire race of potential customers.
Since even in the deep South, most whites did not hate blacks enough to boycott a racially integrated establishment, any business that discriminated against blacks could have expected to lose more black customers than it gained white ones. Historically, it was the blacks who boycotted the segregated streetcars, not the whites who boycotted the integrated ones. Furthermore, as these early boycotts clearly illustrate, blacks who were discriminated against would gladly take their business elsewhere, which is why competing stores would have found it profitable to establish a policy of non-discrimination.
The only reason that racial segregation survived as long as it did was through the obstruction of free enterprise -- either from segregationist laws, the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, or regulatory harassment by local, racist governments. Such coercive measure were considered necessary precisely because white supremacists realized that without some kind of enforcement, segregation would have succumbed to the incentives of the marketplace. What's interesting about the discussion here is the pathetic moralistic blathering intended to smother dissent. Rand is like an anti-Marx to the true believers here. No nuances, no grays, no exceptions, etc., nothing resembling real life. Ok, boys, sorry for the interruption, please resume Bible studies. Jack, if I offended you, I apologize. Had David Shreve been one of the list members, I would not have engaged in the kind of sarcastic polemic that I did. Nor did I think that anyone else on the list was of a comparable persuasion, such that he or she would be grievously offended by my comments. But if you're going to criticize Objectivists for their sarcasm, I dare say that you're not setting a very good example with your "Bible studies" jab. Besides, there's as much adherence to doctrine among Harvard liberals as there is among Objectivists. In academia, almost everyone has his or her school of thought, so I wouldn't be too quick to attack Objectivists for adhering to theirs.
- Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer
on 11/01, 12:42am)
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