This Week on the Web (December 23 – December 29)


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Quote of the Week:

“There's nothing so arrogant as a person preaching the virtue of humility.”

- Michael Hurd


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NEWS

Small businesses brace for minimum wage hike
MSNBC.com

Economists and politicians may disagree about the economic impact of a looming increase in the U.S. minimum wage, but Ohio restaurateur Dean Gregory already knows how much it will cost him.

“We've already figured out it's going to cost us between $125,000 and $150,000 a year. I'll have to raise my prices, definitely,” Gregory said.
[…]

While Schneider didn't bother to fight the proposed wage increase — he said he knew popular opinion was against him — he thinks the public may regret its generosity.

“I don't think consumers quite understand that at some point they're going to have to pay for the increased cost of goods,” Schneider said, pointing out that the poorest Americans — which the wage increase was supposed to help — will feel the pinch of rising prices the most.


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COMMENTARY


Moral Values Without Religion
Peter Schwartz, Capitalism Magazine

Does morality depend upon religion? Most people believe it does, which is a major reason behind the appeal of the religious right. People believe that without faith in a supernatural authority, we can have no moral values--no moral absolutes, no black-and-white distinctions, no firm demarcation between good and evil--in life or in politics. This is the assumption underlying Justice Antonin Scalia's assertion that "government derives its authority from God," since only religious faith can supposedly provide moral constraints on human action.

And what draws people to this bizarre premise--the premise that there is no rational basis for refraining from murder, rape or anarchism? The left's persistent assault on moral values.
[…]

The real alternative to the leftist claptrap is a morality of reason. Such a morality begins with the individual's life as the primary value and identifies the further values that are demonstrably required to sustain that life. It observes that man's nature demands that we live not by random urges or by animal instincts, but by the faculty that distinguishes us from animals and on which our existence fundamentally depends: rationality.

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Health Care is Not a Right
Leonard Peikoff, Capitalism Magazine

Most people who oppose socialized medicine do so on the grounds that it is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical; i.e., it is a noble idea -- which just somehow does not work. I do not agree that socialized medicine is moral and well-intentioned, but impractical. Of course, it is impractical -- it does not work -- but I hold that it is impractical because it is immoral. This is not a case of noble in theory but a failure in practice; it is a case of vicious in theory and therefore a disaster in practice. So I'm going to leave it to other speakers to concentrate on the practical flaws in the Clinton health plan. I want to focus on the moral issue at stake. So long as people believe that socialized medicine is a noble plan, there is no way to fight it. You cannot stop a noble plan -- not if it really is noble. The only way you can defeat it is to unmask it -- to show that it is the very opposite of noble. Then at least you have a fighting chance.

What is morality in this context? The American concept of it is officially stated in the Declaration of Independence. It upholds man's unalienable, individual rights. The term "rights," note, is a moral (not just a political) term; it tells us that a certain course of behavior is right, sanctioned, proper, a prerogative to be respected by others, not interfered with -- and that anyone who violates a man's rights is: wrong, morally wrong, unsanctioned, evil.



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The Unlearned Lesson of Enron--5 Years Later
Alex Epstein, Capitalism Magazine

Enron was brought down by irrational business decisions, not fraud.

Five years ago this month, Enron Corporation--number 7 on the Fortune 500--filed for bankruptcy, culminating a collapse that shocked America.

It is commonly believed that Enron fell because its leaders, eager to make money, schemed to bilk investors. The ethical lesson, it is said, is that we must teach (or force) a businessman to curb his selfish, profit-seeking "impulses" before they turn criminal.

But all this is wrong.

Enron was not brought down by fraud; while the company committed fraud, its fraud was primarily an attempt to cover up tens of billions of dollars already lost--not embezzled--in irrational business decisions. Most of its executives believed that Enron was a basically productive company that could be righted. This is why Chairman Ken Lay did not flee to the Caymans with riches, but stayed through the end.


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The Wages of Growth: To lift worker incomes, cut the corporate tax rate
Opinion Journal

The latest reports on wages and income have been rolling in, and with them we can discount one more canard about the current economic expansion--namely, that wages are stagnant and workers are doing far more poorly than they did in that second Age of Pericles known as the 1990s.

Over the past year, the real average wage for non-supervisory employees has risen 2.8%. That equates to about a $1,200 increase in purchasing power for the typical household this year. Last year, real median household income was also up 1.1% after inflation. This rise in take-home pay helps to explain how Americans have had the disposable income this Christmas shopping season to pay $600 for PlayStation 3 computer games and $150 for the Kid-Tough Digital Camera for three-year-olds.

It is true that income and wages are still about 2% below the peak they hit in 2000 before the dot-com bust and recession. But a new Treasury Department analysis finds that, measuring from the start of the peak of each expansion, wages so far in this decade's cycle are running ahead of the recovery pace during the 1990s. Thus the "stagnant wages" story can join the "jobless recovery," the "outsourcing" crisis and the runaway budget deficit as other tales of woe that have all turned out to be evanescent.


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Other links

The Ayn Rand Institute

The Objective Standard

Capitalism Magazine

4Commonsense.net

OpinionJournal.com

Junk Science

Activism Humor

The Intellectual Activist


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Web Logs

Principles in Practice– Principled commentary on cultural matters and current events from “The Objective Standard”

Cox and Forkum – Political cartoons and commentary

Noodle Food

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid – Donald Luskin

Dollars and Crosses – CapitalismMagazine.com

Rule of Reason – The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism

4CommonSense

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