George Will's salary ought to be $0/hr

[n2doc]

'cause that's all his "opinons" are worth....
The Right Minimum Wage
By George F. Will
Thursday, January 4, 2007; Page A17


A federal minimum wage is an idea whose time came in 1938, when public confidence in markets was at a nadir and the federal government's confidence in itself was at an apogee. This, in spite of the fact that with 19 percent unemployment and the economy contracting by 6.2 percent in 1938, the New Deal's frenetic attempts had failed to end, and perhaps had prolonged, the Depression.

Today, raising the federal minimum wage is a bad idea whose time has come, for two reasons, the first of which is that some Democrats have an evidently incurable disease -- New Deal Nostalgia. Witness Nancy Pelosi's "100 hours" agenda, a genuflection to FDR's 100 Days. Perhaps this nostalgia resonates with the 5 percent of Americans who remember the 1930s.

Second, President Bush has endorsed raising the hourly minimum from $5.15 to $7.25 by the spring of 2009. The Democratic Congress will favor that, and he may reason that vetoing this minor episode of moral grandstanding would not be worth the predictable uproar -- Washington uproar often is inversely proportional to the importance of the occasion for it. Besides, there would be something disproportionate about the president vetoing this feel-good bit of legislative fluff after not vetoing the absurdly expensive 2002 farm bill, or the 2005 highway bill larded with 6,371 earmarks or the anti-constitutional McCain-Feingold speech-rationing bill.

snip

But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly. But that is a good idea whose time will never come again.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/03/AR2007010301619_pf.html

Yeah, really a F88kin great idea, willy. Go move your a** to a third world "heaven". I suggest Afganistan or maybe Iraq, I hear there are losts of good men who need work over there...

[Strawman]

1. His prolonged gainful employment is evidence enough of "market failure"

[HughBeaumont]

2. If you think 7.25 is too much to pay for labor . . .

$0. Wow, that's genius, Bewshbot. So does that mean we don't have to PAY for products now? Does that mean you favor the Gilded Age, a time of great prosperity for several rich white Americans?

Why can't this Reaganite fossil PLEASE retire? This curmudgeon relic says NOTHING of value, even from a Republican point of view.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

3. If labor is simply a commodity then so are human lives.

[atommom]

4. So, George, why did public confidence in markets "reach a nadir"?

The public had just seen how devastating the unregulated market could be. If people like George Will had had their way, the Depression would have lasted far longer.

The Third World might seem like a heaven to him, since he assumes he'll always be a part of the ruling class, but the rest of us have scruples about screwing over the underclass to make the rich richer. He does not seem to understand the human side of the equation.

[n2doc]

5. Good response to the article:

One Market Under God
George Will speaks the gospel of the GOP elite and libertarians with his argument that the minimum wage should be $0. Trust the market, he says, and wages will be set to a decent level. Of course, that's what got us here in the first place. Blindly trusting the market to do what's right without any policing inevitably leads to the market's participants doing everything within their power to line their pockets and bollocks to everyone else.

The whole reason we've got minimum wage law and other labor laws is that left to their own designs businesses colluded with each other, fixed their prices, and paid their workers next to nothing in horrible life-threatening conditions (and some of those laborers were children).

Capitalism is great and it works, but without policing, rules, and enforcement it is the playground of devils - devoid of morality and a pariah on our society. We learned that lesson collectively already, we won't repeat it. America's past that.

UPDATE: This is the kind of story that makes regular people roll their eyes when the conservative elite pooh-poohs a piddling increase in the minimum wage.

By the end of 2005, Nardelli received packages worth $154.3 million, not counting the value of stock options, since becoming CEO. His pay for 2006 hasn't been disclosed.
Now, after six years on the job, Nardelli will get cash severance of $20 million, acceleration of unvested deferred stock awards and options valued at $84 million, vested shares worth $44 million, bonuses and long-term incentives of $9 million, 401(k) payouts of $2 million, retirement benefits of $32 million and $18 million in other entitlements if he abides by no-compete clauses over the next four years.

The total package is seven times the $30 million Home Depot set aside last June for stores and employees that provide good customer service. Home Depot has 2,127 stores and 355,000 employees in the United States, Canada, Mexico and China.


But clearly $7.25/hr means the end of civilization as we know it as the unwashed hordes get a tepid increase in pay. Bob Nardelli's gold-encrusted loafers don't go for free, you know!

http://www.oliverwillis.com/2007/01/one_market_unde.html

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

6. He's not worth that much.