Fire and Knowledge

Good use of property … seems to require not only ownership but personal occupation and use by the owner. That is to say that the good use of property requires the widest possible distribution of ownership.

—Wendell Berry, “Property, Patriotism, and National Defense” in Home Economics (1986), p. 106.

In a waiting room yesterday I had the pleasure of listening to these profound pontifications from a loud-mouthed fat man in an orange shirt. I find it interesting how opinionated we can be on subjects where we obviously have very little understanding.

“I just can’t see things getting any better in this country. Oil is at, what, $130 a barrel? Greed. It’s all greed.”

“The farmer’s ain’t growing any food for us anymore — they’re growing it all for fuel!”

“Why do they keep raising the price of diesel? I have a diesel motorhome. It makes everything more expensive because trucks use diesel. It’s a damn shame. It’s just uncalled for.”

“Oil ain’t ever going down. We’ve got a President who makes money off oil, and he’s not going to let the price go down.”

Glenn Beck talks about the $52 trillion economic asteroid that might come our way in 2019 — that is, the asteroid of Social Security and Medicare. That would be “an IOU of around $455,000 per American household.” According to the U.S. Treasury Secretary, “without change, rising costs will drive government spending to unprecedented levels, consume nearly all projected federal revenues, and threaten America’s future prosperity.”

It would be comforting to believe that the government can simply decree higher pay for low-wage workers, without having to worry about unfortunate repercussions, but the preponderance of evidence indicates that labor is not exempt from the basic economic principle that artificially high prices cause surpluses. In the case of surplus human beings, that can be a special tragedy when they are already from low-income, unskilled, or minority backgrounds and urgently need to get on the job ladder if they are ever to move up the ladder by acquiring experience and skills.

—Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 215.

Among two million Americans earning at or near the minimum wage in the early twenty-first century, just over half were from 16 to 24 years of age. Just over half worked part time. Yet political campaigns to increase the minimum wage often talk in terms of providing “a living wage” sufficient to support a family of four—such families as most minimum workers do not have and would be ill-advised to have before they reach the point where they can feed and clothe their children. Nevertheless, a number of American cities have passed “living wage” laws, which are essentially local minimum wage laws specifying a higher minimum than the national minimum wage law. Their effects have been similar to the effects of national minimum wage laws in the United States and other countries—that is, the poorest people have been the ones who have most often lost jobs.

—Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 213.

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (Or worse, convenience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), pp. 126-127.

Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.

—Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 211.

If bus drivers were not unionized and were paid no more than was necessary to attract qualified people, then undoubtedly their wage rates would be lower and it would then be profitable for the transit companies to hire more of them and use shorter buses. Not only would the total cost of moving passengers be less, passengers would have less time to wait at bus stops because of the shorter and more numerous buses. This is not a small concern to people waiting on street corners on cold winter days or in high-crime neighborhoods at night.

—Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 203.