Some Links

by Don Boudreaux on January 22, 2019

Pierre Lemieux corrects some of Matthew Bishop’s misapprehensions about trade.

Also debunking alleged reasons to fear international trade – fear fueled today by Trump’s ignorant rhetoric – is Mark Perry (with help from Alan Blinder).

At his Facebook page, Bob Higgs serves up this excellent piece of straight talk about the economic reality that renders minimum wages harmful to the workers whom they are ostensibly meant to help:

Employers pay nearly all their employees more than the legal minimum wage, most of them much more, yet no one ever credits the employers with generosity or a laudable sense of social justice for doing so, nor should they. How much an employee needs in order to maintain a certain level of living is irrelevant to an employer’s decisions about hiring or the terms of employment he offers. If an employee can add more to the firm’s revenue than the cost of employing him, he will be hired. If the law requires that an employee must be paid more than the addition he can make to a firm’s revenue, he will not be hired. Hardly anything in the entire corpus of economics is simpler or more obvious, yet many — perhaps most — people either ignore it or dismiss it out of hand.

And here’s yet more insight from Bob Higgs.

Bretigne Shaffer writes wisely about the Catholic high-school kid’s recent encounter with a native American.

Neal McCluskey explains that school choice is, above all, about liberty.

And, as detailed by Nick Gillespie, school choice also promotes better schooling.

David Bier is rightly unimpressed with Trump’s new border-wall offer.

In the Wall Street Journal, the writer Stephen Miller corrects an anonymous New Yorker reviewer for mindlessly repeating the trope that capitalism “ravages.”

“Identity politics is devouring itself.”