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Why is it that the states with the highest unemployment rates (Oregon, Washington and Alaska, for example) have the highest minimum wage laws? Why is it that in any one area the most unskilled workers, usually comprised of teenagers and minorities, have a much higher unemployment rate than the rest of the population? The answers are explained in a concise article provided by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute explaining why Economists are against raising the minimum wage. What You Need to Know About the Minimum Wage The short answer is that Economists are against the minimum wage precisely because it hurts the poorest members of society the most . As the Wall Street Journal has noted , "This is one of the most settled propositions in economics, second only perhaps to free trade." What's ironic about this is that, contrary to public opinion, it is actually those who oppose raising the minimum wage that have the poorest members of society in mind. This was a difficult concep...

I just finished watching Brainwashing 101 , a "film showing how universities use tools such as "speech codes" to force political [liberal] views upon students". You can watch it free here . One of the things that caught my attention was a character in the film. Sukhmani Singh Khalsa pictured below. The first impression one would get from seeing Sukhmani would be to assume that he is a Muslim and liberal in his beliefs, given the similarities between his headgear (turban) and that of the Taliban of Afghanistan. The fact of the matter is that he is a Sikh and conservative. Sikh’s are not Muslims and have had a rather violent history with Muslims. Working as an Engineer at a wireless company and going to UCSD gives me the opportunity to interact with a lot of Sikhs. My officemate, who comes from a Sikh family, tells me that most people you meet in this country who have turbans are not Muslims, but Sikhs. The moral of the story is that the next time you meet someone wea...

Let us never forget.

The WSJ($) is reporting that the same countries that would vote for John Kerry for President would also vote for a weaker America, the article writes, It turns out that another survey, this one taken by the Marshall Fund in June, found that 58% of Europeans consider "strong U.S. leadership to be undesirable." Leave aside the fact that Europe seems to prefer "strong U.S. leadership" when the Marines are storming Normandy or imposing a peace that Europeans failed to achieve in the Balkans. More significant for the current moment is that these polls show that the same Europeans who overwhelmingly favor the election of John Kerry also favor a weaker America. We'll let our readers decide what that says about the two American candidates. It looks like even Europeans understand that if their goal is a weaker America, John Kerry is their man. ;)

Russell Roberts, Professor of Economics, writes that it does. He explains himself here , than here , and here . Great reads. Update: Added Walter Williams discussion on the topic .

As noted in the Heritage Foundation Policy Weblog : Researchers have completed a study of Colombia’s secondary-school voucher program, PACES, which “awarded nearly 125,000 vouchers to low-income high school students…between 1991 and 1997.” The vouchers covered approximately half of the average private-school tuition for selected students, provided they continued to make “adequate academic progress.” Produced by the National Bureau of Economic Report, this report is one of the first to measure the long-term impact of vouchers. By comparing winners and losers of Colombia’s voucher lottery (a perfect control experiment), the study finds A 15-20 percent increase in secondary school graduation rates for voucher recipients; A .2 standard deviation bump in standardized test scores for voucher recipients; A closing of the performance gap between boys and girls among voucher recipients; and The greatest improvement for voucher recipients among the lowest-performing students. So there ...