By Rob Janicki
Okay, I simply played off and expanded the caption line from the article, "Elizabeth Warren's Economic Stupidity". by Robert Tracinski in Real Clear Markets.
This article interested me on two levels. First, I think Elizabeth Warren is overrated far beyond what questionable academic abilities she may possess or think she possesses. Second, the liberal progressive false argument for increasing the minimum wage has always interested me ever since I learned how economically absurd it is.
Enter Elizabeth Warren.
The problem with a reductio ad absurdum argument is that sometimes your opponent accepts the absurdity and just runs with it...
And here's Warren running with the absurd.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, suggested raising the minimum wage to $22 per hour is only logical if you look at the numbers...
Warren's argument fails when the concept is extrapolated out. Why stop with $22 per hour? If $22 per hour is far more preferable than the current $7.75 per hour, why not make it $30, $40 or $50 per hour? Wouldn't that put every worker smack dab right up there in the middle class and eliminate poverty once and for all time? Not likely since no employer would hire someone with no work skills at those hourly rates. At those rates employers would invest in more mechanical means to achieve the desired work productivity, thus cutting out unskilled labor from earning any wage. That's why unemployment is so high among 16 to 25 year old unskilled youth looking for work.
The issue here isn't native intelligence; it's irrationality. The Warrens and Marxes and Kants follow stupid ideas to their absurd extremes because they are committed to maintaining a belief in a fixed idea regardless of evidence. Kant wanted "to deny reason in order to make room for faith." Marx wanted to smear Europe's rising new capitalists as parasites and exploiters. In Elizabeth Warren's case, she is just following up on her resentful rant about how entrepreneurs "didn't build that." She already gave us fair warning that she wants to ignore the productivity-enhancing investments of the capitalists and entrepreneurs and attribute the entire product of their effort to the hapless "little guy" (and his government champions). Her absurd pronouncement about a $22 minimum wage is the logical result...
Warren's thinking process is the same as Obama's. They both have staked a claim on absurd and completely mistaken concepts of economics and are determined to craft an outcome that is impossible to achieve in reality, just like Marx and Kant. And, like Marx and Kant, the only way this is possible on any level is through a totalitarian socialist government completely commanding and controlling the economy. It's never worked in the history of the world and it has no chance of changing that fact going forward, despite the chronic argument of liberals, that all they need is the right people to control and command the economy. It certainly won't be from Obama, who admitted his math knowledge stopped at Algebra, which he never mastered.
1 year later. Still true.
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