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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion

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To: one_less who wrote (5096)	11/20/2006 6:41:32 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (3) of 10087

Rangel and Friedman on the Draft gregmankiw.blogspot.com BRKelley said... I think too many times academics miss the forest for the trees. Conscription, just like the minimum wage, is price-fixing. Whereas the purpose of the minimum wage is to set the price of labor above the market clearing price, the intent of conscription is to fix wages of soldiers below the market clearing level. Fixing the price of labor below the market-clearing level is merely devaluing the labor of soldiers, indeed their lives. Set a price low enough, and the value would be zero. We call this cannon fodder. When the value of any commodity is fixed at zero, it is wasted because the consumer bears no cost. When a government puts a low enough price on its soldiers, politicians would be more likely -- not less -- to waste such lives in unpopular or unwise conflicts, or deploy them in haphazard fashion. 2:42 PM gregmankiw.blogspot.com

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