All Posts Tagged With: "employment"

Capitalism and Coercion

A century and more ago, when Marxism was in its ascendancy as a theory, its followers (as well as many others) naturally believed its dogma about workers being the helpless pawns of capitalists–forced to sell their labor at less than its true worth, with no real alternative. But now, despite Marxism’s collapse as both a [...]

1Feb2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

A Light Goes Out in New Zealand

I have often referred to New Zealand’s 1991 Employment Contracts Act (ECA) as a model of voluntary unionism that we in the United States would be wise to emulate. Notwithstanding its shortcomings—including its mandatory personal grievance provisions, its creation of the specialist Employment Court, and its failure to do anything about the minimum-wage law—the ECA [...]

1Sep2000 | | 0 comments | Continued

Take This Job and Shove It, at the Margin

Many believe that pay is overemphasized and much too unequal in market economies. Supposedly, most people enjoy working, and so while they have to be paid to survive comfortably, they don’t have to be bribed with bonuses tied to performance to do a good job. Indeed, psychological experiments indicate that the intrinsic interest people have in doing a task declines when they are paid for doing it.

1Sep2000 | | 0 comments | Continued

La Lucha: The Human Cost of Economic Repression in Cuba

Patricia Linderman is a writer and translator currently living in Leipzig, Germany. As I opened the gate of the high security fence around my yard in Havana, a black woman in her 30s glanced left and right and quickly wheeled her rusty Chinese bicycle inside. Her name was Marta, and she was wearing a pair [...]

1May2000 | | 4 comments | Continued

Technology, Progress, and Freedom

Edward Younkins is professor of accountancy and business administration at Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia. Technology represents man’s attempt to make life easier. Technological advances improve people’s standard of living, increase leisure time, help eliminate poverty, and lead to a greater variety of products. Progress allows people more time to spend on higher [...]

1Jan2000 | | 1 comment | Continued

Reclassifying a Classic

Daniel Oliver is a research associate at the Washington, D.C.-based Capital Research Center (http://www.capitalresearch.org) and a freelance writer. A version of this article originally appeared in the December 26, 1997, Wall Street Journal. For a century and a half, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) has been read and reread, told and retold, performed [...]

1Dec1999 | | 24 comments | Continued

Recycling Labor

In 1998 Boeing and MCI WorldCom, to mention only two, announced plans for massive layoffs. Boeing actually cut 48,000 jobs. Throughout 1998 there were many announcements of intended mergers—for example, Exxon with Mobil and Chevron with Shell—most of which included plans for substantial job cuts. Total layoff announcements in the United States in 1998 exceeded [...]

1Apr1999 | | 2 comments | Continued

Think Tank Wars and the Minimum Wage

True to form, Senator Edward Kennedy is pushing legislation to hike the minimum wage 41 percent, to $7.25 per hour by September 2002. President Bill Clinton has naturally jumped on the bandwagon, though he only wants to go to $6.15 an hour. He declared before last November’s election: “We are fighting hard for the dignity of living wage [sic] in the face of partisanship that refused us last time.”

1Apr1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

Sen or Sense

Barun Mitra is a founder and the managing trustee of Liberty Institute, an independent think tank in New Delhi, India. He has published widely, including in the Wall Street Journal. In the battle over economics, the victory of the market seemed decisive. It had not been easy. Since the days of Adam Smith, the world [...]

1Feb1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Minimum Wage

Mr. Sohr is a student, and Dr. Block a former professor, at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr. Block is now chair of the department of economics and finance at the University of Central Arkansas. The second stage of the minimum-wage increase approved by Congress last year recently took effect. What [...]

1Nov1997 | | 2 comments | Continued

The Social Function of Mr. Henry Ford

Spencer Heath (1876-1963) was a pioneer in aviation manufacturing and the author of Citadel, Market and Altar: Emerging Society. His grandson Spencer Heath McCallum found this letter in the course of cataloguing his grandfather’s writings for the Institute for Humane Studies. Miss Thompson was a well-known journalist whose column, “On the Record,” appeared in the [...]

1Nov1996 | | 2 comments | Continued

The Courage to Try

Mr. Orlowski is a writer and small-business owner in New Hampshire. Every so often, a seemingly mundane event occurs in our lives that ends up affecting us in a profound manner. I’m not speaking of a major life change, like a death or serious illness, but of something that could easily be overlooked or quickly [...]

1Aug1996 | | 0 comments | Continued

Government Licensing: The Enemy of Employment

Dr. Yates is Bradley Visiting Fellow at the Center for Economic Personalism at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong with Affirmative Action, published by ICS Press in 1994. Not long ago I found myself without a job. The experience offered me [...]

1Jul1996 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Minimum Wage’s Dirty Little Secret

David Laband is Professor of Economics at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. The current administration and their pals in the Congress only too obviously think that boosting the minimum wage by 90 cents per hour over the next two years is good politics (if bad economics). They are demonstrably wrong. This battle plan for “helping” [...]

1Sep1995 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Minimum Wage Law

Professor Kazmann lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The minimum wage law is based on the assumption that some minimum hourly rate of pay should be legislated so that people will have a minimum income to support themselves and their families. The law makes it illegal for an employer to pay an hourly rate lower than [...]

1Jun1995 | | 0 comments | Continued

Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action

“Sensitive” is the word people use to describe political rows over civil rights, an issue that mixes economics, social policy, and race. We know what we’re supposed to think: the “civil-rights struggle” was the most heroic political movement in American history. We are not, however, supposed to notice its catastrophic results: race relations are worse [...]

1Jun1995 | | 0 comments | Continued

Minimum Wages

Few economic laws, if any, are more malicious and malignant than minimum wage laws. They prohibit workers from accepting employment unless they are paid at least the minimum. They order employers to use only workers who qualify for the minimum and reject all others. The laws erect a hurdle over which all American workers are [...]

1Mar1995 | | 0 comments | Continued
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