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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed

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To: Don Lloyd who wrote (106565)	6/5/2001 10:21:31 AM
From: flatsville	Read Replies (2) of 436258

>>>I believe 'institutional' unemployment was in a quote I referenced, but I have no idea what the qualifier means in context. I certainly do not know what you mean by it.<<< I took it to mean built-in, perhaps chronic or wholesale. (You want me to explain your supporting literature to you? <ggg>) Your initial assertion was a blanket indictment of any economist who supported legal minimum wage using the argument that it does not cause unemployment. Of course I think you'd have a hard time finding such a creature. You assigned an opinion to a nonexistent person and then attacked them. The classic straw man argument-- >>>Any economist who either claims that legal minimum wages do not cause unemployment or that price controls do not cause shortages is not a real economist, but rather a political economic junk scientist who sells his professional opinion for money and/or status.<<< Of course the real question is, does it produce a significant or an intolerable level of unemployment? To what degree? And significant or intolerable to who? I haven't seen anything definitive...marginal unemployment at best among some groups...for reasons that remain unclear...noted by short term studies...coming from camps on either side of the argument. You then used the except below from mises site to support your position when I asked you for hard nos. on the unemployment issue-- mises.org "...There is no need for economics to enter into an examination of the problems of jurisdictional strikes and of various laws, especially of the American New Deal, which were admittedly loaded against the employers and assigned a privileged position to the unions. There is only one point that matters. If a government decree or labor union pressure and compulsion fix wage rates above the height of the potential market rates, institutional unemployment results. " You raised the specter of something horrible, "institutional" unemployment, using the above to support your position. Fellow "free marketeers" gladly fixated on the specter. I guess they failed to notice that "compulsion fix wage rates above the height of the potential market rates" part. We're still exploring that threshold IMO. Where you are now on this having clarified your position is quite moderate-- >>>the actual unemployment depends on too many variables to be predicted, as it has a substantial threshold effect (increases in wage costs can be offset by other changes, including fringes, to a limited degree before explicit layoffs occur).<<< I've found that what generally happens when this issue gets debated the is battle opens up on numerous fronts other than economic. The moral and sentimental fronts are my favorites. At one point you mentioned something about destroying children down the road in an effort to save their parents? (Oh, boy...that one goes in a file for future reference when I have time to go back and find it.) Easy to get off-track, no? So around and around we go. I'm just trying to get back to fight weight on this issue myself. Dems take control of the Senate today I believe. It will be time to go back to work soon.

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