Dan Polsby, former Dean of the GMU School of Law, emailed to me the following note. Dean Dan sent it in response to this latest post of mine expressing skepticism of the claims by Oren Cass and some others that American workers are generally underpaid. (I thank Dan for his kind permission to share his email publicly.)
Entrepreneurs who have identified huge opportunities don’t (fortunately) need the skills to exploit their insight by themselves. They hire people who do have the necessary knowhow. Gold miners don’t know how to make gold, they may not be able to drive skiploaders to dig gold, they probably can’t refine gold (or maintain skiploaders!) nor move gold securely to market nor keep the books and figure out the taxes – so what? If all you know is that you’re sitting on a gold mine, and you know you don’t know how to exploit it, do you say, “aw shux, never mind, guess I’ll just plant some sorghum”? At a minimum, wouldn’t you sell it to someone who could do and arrange for such things? The claim must be that there is a gold mine out there, just sitting there in the sunshine all fat and happy, that literally nobody on earth is willing to exploit. That’s some claim.
……
DBx: Yup!
