Monday 2 April 2012

More economic ignorance

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This government again confirms its economic ignorance: in the midst of high unemployment, economic stagnation and with the sovereign debt time-bomb about to explode across the world, it elected to appease ignorant leftists raise  the minimum wage, starting today—raising costs for marginal producers at precisely the time neither they nor their employees need it.

It is now obvious this is a government that will do anything to remain popular, anything that it except to take the hard decisions that might actually take “the sharp edges” of the recession.

They are an economic disaster.*

As Murray Rothbard once observed,

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

It is even worse to be a minister and put your economic ignorance into practice.

* Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan: “Just as no physicist would claim that "water runs uphill," no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a
handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”
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