Author Archives: Tom Mullen

The Best Argument Against Minimum Wage Laws: You Don’t Own Other People

min wage article pic With Democrats about to take control of the House, it is likely we will see an increase in the federal minimum wage pass the lower chamber, even if it has no chance of becoming a law. We will just as surely hear opponents making completely sound economic arguments against minimum wage laws.

Minimum wage laws cause unemployment, these opponents say, because they price those workers whose skills don’t justify the minimum wage out of the market completely. If a worker only has the skills to produce $14/hour worth of benefits to an employer, the employer is better off not employing that person rather than losing $1 dollar/hour doing so, if the minimum wage is $15/hour. And regardless of where the minimum wage is presently, any increase in the price of labor will result in less demand for labor, all other things being equal.

That’s basic economic reasoning and wasn’t even controversial until recently when, for political reasons, economists like Paul Krugman began contradicting their own earlier writing on the same subject. But as economically sound as the unemployment argument against minimum wages may be, it ignores a previous and much more important one: you don’t own other people.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Some real “politically incorrect” talk on Veterans Day

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BC928881-DA33-4445-A218-C9A3144641F4 I’m told the former Armistice Day, co-opted by the warfare state to celebrate war rather than its absence, is not the time to remind my fellow taxpayers that no war in the past seventy years has benefited them in any way whatsoever, much less preserved what freedom they have left.

I disagree. What better time than when the myth Americans are freer because of these wars is echoing from every media outlet, statehouse and social media channel to point out the harm this propaganda continues to do?

No American would be less free if Washington, D.C. had abstained from invading Afghanistan, Iraq, or Africa (the invasion nobody talks about). On the contrary, they’d be freer, richer, and would suffer less blowback terrorism than they have these past seventeen years. No American would be less free if Washington had stayed out of Vietnam or Korea, either.

In response to to these rather obvious observations, we’re often regaled with the somewhat irrelevant claim that people join the military to “defend the Constitution” and it is only politicians who are to blame for the unconstitutional and immoral wars constantly waged by the DC empire.

The reasons people join have nothing to do with whether American taxpayers benefit from any of this. But let’s be honest here. The overwhelming majority of people who join the military do so because it greatly improves their economic situation. At what point, after decades of unconstitutional, unnecessary wars of aggression, will people who join the military voluntarily bear some responsibility?

21 Months Later, Nothing in DC Has Changed Under Trump

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Publication1 Despite 21 straight months of screaming headlines from both anti-Trump and pro-Trump media, virtually nothing about Washington, DC and it’s empire has changed.

There are still US troops and their suppliers voraciously consuming taxes all over the world. Not a single regulatory agency has been eliminated or significantly cut. Entitlements continue their headlong sprint towards fiscal oblivion. And federal spending continues to outpace inflation, faster under Republicans, as usual.

And honestly, neither Republicans nor Democrats voted against any of that.

Trump was able to win the 2016 election not because he was going to radically change Washington, DC, but because he was going to superficially change its marketing from “progressive” to “conservative.” To be fair, he never promised to cut anything. On the contrary, he promised not to touch Social Security or Medicare and to increase spending on the military. He’s kept both promises.

He did promise to eliminate two regulations for every new one, but that is a very vague promise. Suppose there was one regulation that said all construction workers had to wear hard hats and another regulation that said they all had to wear safety googles. Repealing both regulations and replacing them with one that says, “All construction workers must wear hard hats and safety goggles” is perfectly consistent with Trump’s promise. Is that what his regulators are doing? It’s hard to tell. It appears the federal register is smaller, but is the economy fundamentally less regulated? What happened to getting rid of whole federal departments, as Republicans promised to do just six years ago?

The truth is the so-called Swamp continues because most Americans don’t really want to drain it, despite overwhelming evidence that everything it does creates large-scale human misery. Just ask any ten neighbors if they’d support cutting Social Security or Medicare, much less eliminating either, or cutting the military by even 30% (which would still leave it by far the largest in the world). Ask them if they’d support getting rid of the Departments of Education, Agriculture, or even the completely useless Department of Commerce.

When push comes to shove, they won’t even support getting rid of the TSA, which is Oh-fer in seventeen years on preventing actual terrorist attacks and still has a well over 90% fail rate in detecting dangerous items on its own tests. That’s not to mention the nightmarish surveillance state, five years after Edward Snowden exposed it. Americans are only upset about it when it spies on politicians – a completely backwards position in a supposedly free country.

The mid-term elections are approaching and the usual “this is the last chance to save the republic” rhetoric is already reaching a fever pitch. In reality, nothing about the republic has changed or will change until a critical mass of Americans truly want less government. Right now, that’s hard to imagine considering who wins elections.

Tucker Carlson Feeling the Bern Illustrates Conservatism’s Hostility to Free Markets

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screenshot-2018-08-31-at-92959-am Tucker Carlson is feeling the Bern on at least one well-established left-wing narrative: that corporations are robbing everyday Americans by paying their workers so little that many of them qualify for food stamps or other welfare benefits. Thus, the founders of Amazon, Uber, Walmart, and other corporate behemoths get richer while taxpayers are forced to pay part of their labor costs.

Carlson appears honestly surprised to be saying “Bernie is right,” referring to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who plans to introduce legislation forcing corporations to “pay back” the government by taxing corporations at 100 percent of all food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, and other federal assistance paid to their employees.

He shouldn’t be.

Conservatism shares the same hostility to laissez-faire markets as modern liberalism. Both are ultimately collectivist philosophies, hostile to liberty in general, albeit for slightly different reasons, and prone to economic fallacy to rationalize that hostility.

Economic Errors

First, to the economic errors. It’s hard to believe Carlson could get so many things wrong in under five minutes, starting with his general premise. He and Bernie argue the problem is the corporations not paying enough, resulting in taxpayers having to pick up the slack. But business enterprises in a free market are supposed to seek the lowest prices they can find for labor and other inputs. That’s how market economies drive down the costs of consumer goods and make all members of society richer.

The problem isn’t businesses acting in their economic self-interest; it’s the existence of the welfare programs themselves. They are an intervention in the market that distorts the price of labor. If they did not exist, the market would naturally set labor prices higher because employees wouldn’t accept jobs that didn’t pay them enough to cover the necessities currently subsidized by the programs.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

The Pledge of Allegiance is Un-American

“One Nation”

It’s really what comes next that contradicts both of the republic’s founding documents. “One nation, indivisible” is the precise opposite of the spirit of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (“under God” wasn’t added until the 1950s).

The government in Washington, D.C., is called “the federal government.” A federal government governs a federation, not a nation. And the one persistent point of contention throughout the constitutional convention of 1787 and the ratifying conventions which followed it was fear the government created by the Constitution would become a national government rather than a federal one. Both the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights were written primarily to address this concern of the people of New York and the states in general, respectively.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Progressives Want to Revive FDR’s Undemocratic Court-Packing Idea

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Leave the Persians alone, President Trump

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Mr. President,

Just when you had us on our feet cheering your foreign policy courage in meeting with Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin, with all of the Swamp against you, you send an all-caps tweet threatening war with Iran.

I realize this appears to be the same tactic you used with Kim of North Korea – very tough talk ahead of the summit, to put the United States in a position of strength. However, in neither the North Korea nor Russia exchanges were you doing the PNAC crowd’s bidding. They don’t want hot wars with North Korea or Russia; they want the Cold War with Russia back, so they can funnel tax revenues to their friends.

Not so with Iran. They’ve been trying to pick that fight since at least the Clinton years and they’ll do anything they can to paint you into a corner to force you to back up your bellicose statements. Please don’t hand them the paint can and brush, especially after you just stood toe to toe with them on Russia and told them to pound sand.

Here is a request from a net taxpayer: leave the Persians alone. Neither you nor American taxpayers will benefit from a war with Iran. AIPAC is going to deliver over 70% of the Jewish vote to the Democrats no matter what you do (check the Jewish vote totals in the 2004 and 2008 elections after Bush’s Middle East Wars). Taxpayers will sacrifice blood and treasure for…nothing.

Honestly, we don’t even benefit from sanctions on Iran. Reducing the supply of oil and other Iranian exports just makes the whole world poorer than it would be if Iran could trade freely – I don’ t need to explain supply and demand to a Wharton Business School graduate.

Neither do American taxpayers derive any benefit from Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. I know that’s political heresy, but I’m talking to the man who got elected for heretical speech. Ask yourself: Why should American taxpayers care which is the most powerful country in the Middle East? They shouldn’t. That they have any interest in the question is just a PNAC Jedi mind trick.

We should be the well-wishers to Israel’s freedom and independence, but the defender only of our own. Besides, Iran is never going to attack Israel. If you are truly concerned they might, then negotiate a mutual defense treaty with Israel and send it to the Senate for ratification. I’d rather we stop handing out war guarantees, but this is one that will never be used.

The truth is the anti-Iran drumbeat is just more of the Swamp’s failed foreign policy you campaigned against in 2016. Don’t let them trick you into thinking it’s any different. America First!

Society is in every state a blessing, but government…

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DENVER, CO – JUNE 16: The TSA security lines in the main terminal are crowded with vacation travelers on June 16, 2013, in Denver, Colorado. Located 25 miles from downtown, Denver International Airport is the largest airport in the United States. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)

This thing we call “society,” which Thomas Paine correctly observed is separate and distinct from government, is basically an economic arrangement. The basis of and primary reason for society is people exchanging their various goods and services with each other.

I wonder how many hundreds or thousands of years more it will take for people to realize what should be blatantly obvious: that every set of exchanges in which government is heavily involved, by either subsidizing, regulating (aka “protecting established firms from new competition”), or downright monopolizing it, is painful. All these sectors (education, health care, air travel, etc) share the same characteristics: poor service, no accountability, high prices, incredibly outdated, bureaucratic procedures (paper forms, long lines, etc), and lack of choices or options, just to name a few.

Conversely, every industry in which government has low or zero involvement has precisely the opposite characteristics: constantly lower prices, better and always improving service, absolute accountability (you go to a competitor if you’re not happy), cutting edge technology (phone apps, automated texts, etc) and constantly improving ease of use and convenience.

Anyone not completely blinded by their emotions (mostly envy) can see glaringly obvious cause/effect relationships that lead inevitably to one conclusion:

All advancement in human happiness results from markets and other voluntary cooperation and virtually all human misery is rooted in government.

One would think a light bulb would go on sooner or later for most people and government would be banished from most or all human interaction.

Instead, it’s “Thank you sir, may I have another!” ad infinitum.

Trump under siege by the PNAC crowd for seeking peace with Russia

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pnac Twenty-one years ago, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowicz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a host of other “neoconservatives” collaborated on the “Project for the New American Century.” That produced, among other documents, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” in which Thomas Donnelly posited the US had an opportunity after the fall of the Soviet Union to do whatever it wanted militarily, before a new power rose to challenge it.

Dominating foreign policy and entrenched throughout the military and intelligence establishments ever since, these neocons have attempted to prolong that unchallenged status, including doing all they can to ensure Russia would not again become a superpower rival. To that end, the U.S. government has:

– Broken its promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward;” instead rolling the alliance right up to Russia’s borders

– Waged a proxy regime change war against Syria and covertly helped overthrow the elected president of Ukraine, threatening Russia’s only two warm water ports that remain ice-free year round.

– Meddled in Russia’s 2012 elections to attempt to prevent Putin’s re-election, in response to which Russian intelligence retaliated pathetically and ineffectively during the 2016 U.S. presidential election

– Generally done all it can to keep its boot on Russia’s neck and reignite the Cold War, which they’ve somewhat succeeded in doing. This continued throughout the Bush and Obama years – these people don’t care who is president or what you voted for.

They are also likely the primary source of all the propaganda about Trump’s visit to Russia, and the Mueller/Russiagate hoax in general. They will stop at nothing to prevent a normalization of relations with Russia, including fomenting what amounts to mass hysteria among a well-meaning but incredibly naive populace, ready to hate another boogeyman, just like Saddam Hussein (their work as well). Remember “freedom fries?”

Anyone who has read any of my writing knows I am often critical of Trump’s policies, but when you join in on this “treason” nonsense, just be aware of whose side you’re taking. I implore you to look up the document I mentioned for yourselves and check my story.

No, this is not “blaming America” for anything Russia or any other foreign actor does. “America” and the entrenched, unelected bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. are not remotely the same thing, something the American people instinctively grasped during the last election, regardless of whether you believe their candidate was the best solution. And as for anyone who reflexively yells “treason” or even “unpatriotic,” I’d remind them that blind allegiance to one’s government is about as un-American as it gets.