According to Reason, there was a recent spat between the folks at the far-left Nation magazine who until recently did not pay their interns at all and Wal Mart which the left often criticizes for not paying what they believe to be “fair” wages. Interestingly enough, Congress, which loves to hold itself up as a paragon of all that is good and holy, does not pay its interns.
Continuing with the theme of the minimum wage, Tom Woods has an excellent article on the recent protests in New York City by fast food workers. As Woods writes:
Since no one else seems willing to hire them at their current wage rate, it seems to me that the very last institutions they should be angry at are the fast-food restaurants themselves, the only institutions on earth doing anything to improve their standard of living. Why don’t they protest all the places that pay them $0, having refused to hire them at all?
Lastly, if these NYC fast food workers really want to make more money, perhaps they should move to North Dakota where such workers are being paid well (and where the cost of living is far less).
One of the most damaging things government can do is to institute price controls and the minimum wage is a price control on wages. It is insidious because the effects are slow at first and the effects are not obvious.
As a related item, I blame the “healthcare crisis” on the price controls that Medicare brought to the healthcare pricing system over the past few decades.
The Austrian Economist Mises describes the benefits of free market pricing and the impossibility of an economy operating long term without it. See Mises, “THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ECONOMIC CALCULATION UNDER SOCIALISM” at http://mises.org/humanaction/chap26sec1.asp for more.