Troll. Pretty much all newbie posts here are trolls trying to get a rise out of those gullible enough to think what they are reading is for real.

Wait until we get the ones that were 33% in BTC, long on oil and short on the Swiss Franc .... butt be needing stitches.

It’s not often that I agree with the New York Times on matters economic and it might be all the way back in 1987 that I last agreed with it on the subject of the minimum wage. But miracles do happen and so has one here. The NYT was once right on the subject of that minimum wage. They both argued that sure, we want to increase the incomes of the working poor. But doing so will mean that we do the insisting on improving the incomes of those working poor do the paying for the improvement. And also that the correct level of the minimum wage was then and is now zero. Yes, that’s correct, the proper rate for the minimum wage is $0 per hour.

Here is that editorial:

The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00

And here’s part of their argument:

Perhaps the mistake here is to accept the limited terms of the debate. The working poor obviously deserve a better shake. But it should not surpass our ingenuity or generosity to help some of them without hurting others. Here are two means toward that end: Wage supplements. Government might subsidize low wages with cash or payments for medical insurance, pensions or Social Security taxes. Alternatively, Washington could enlarge the existing earned income tax credit, a ”negative” income tax paying up to $800 a year to working poor families. This would permit better targeting, since minimum-wage workers in affluent families would not be eligible.

All entirely true. And we’ve had various papers just recently that back up this point. Here, for example, showing that minimum wage rises don’t in fact help the poor. The major consumers of the output of minimum wage workers are the poor themselves. Yet the majority of recipients of the minimum wage are not in fact those in poor households. Thus the poor themselves carry the burden of price rises that result from the minimum wage rise while they do not gain all of the income benefits from that rise. So, the poor in aggregate lose out.

And we’ve also got the fact that rises in the minimum wage really do destroy jobs. The last 30% rise in the minimum wage destroyed 0.7% of all jobs in the country.

Then today we’ve something very interesting from Don Boudreaux. He’ll forgive me quoting at length, for what he’s giving us is the theoretical points that must hold for it to be true that poor workers actually do benefit from a minimum wage rise:

(1) employers of low-skilled workers really do generally possess monopsony power, and

(2) that the super-competitive earnings by employers made possible by this monopsony power are not competed away on the output side of the market, and

(3) that the nature of the jobs performed by minimum-wage workers do not change significantly for the worse in response to minimum-wage legislation (for example, that employers of such workers do not respond to minimum-wage legislation by providing for their minimum-wage workers fewer on-the-job amenities), and

(4) that the existing conditions of employment under which current empirical investigations are carried out – conditions such as the kinds of firms that exist, their capital/labor ratios, the prevalent details of employment contracts – are themselves not labor-cost-minimizing adjustments to the existence of minimum-wage legislation. If minimum-wage legislation has been around for a long time, it would already have weeded out of the economy business practices and firms that are especially effective at employing disproportionately large numbers of low-skilled workers at wages below the government-stipulated minimum. Therefore, empirical studies done of changes today in the minimum wage will by their very nature be unable to capture the full effects of the minimum wage.

It’s entirely possible to think of times and places when one or other of these do in fact hold. That monopsony power did in fact hold back in the days of the one company town. There really was significant power over the workforce and in my native UK it led to the Truck Acts. Say a one mine town, the employer might pay the workers in tokens or credit at the company store. Which would then overprice the food that they bought with such tokens. The solution was, as those Acts forced them to do, pay the workers in real money so that alternative and non-rip off suppliers could emerge. When there are conditions of monopsony then yes, regulation can be entirely appropriate.

There are those who argue that the paucity of employment opportunities exists in this manner in some parts of the US economy. I think that’s a very hard argument to make except in the smallest detail.

The US military has announced it will send about 400 specialists and hundreds more “enabling forces” to train the rebel Syrian opposition as Washington takes its fight against the Assad government and Islamic State to a new level.

The Pentagon mission, expected to begin as early as March, envisions US specialists training Syrian opposition forces from military bases in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, Cmdr. Elissa Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman, was quoted by the Army Times as saying.

In addition to the 400 military specialists, so-called “enabling forces,” which are to serve as a security detail, will also accompany the trainers, Smith said.

The US-led coalition, which began its bombing campaign over Syrian territory against the jihadist forces of Islamic State [also known as ISIS, or ISIL] in September 2014, includes Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Arab states will be expected to contribute troops to the US operation, which expects to train about 5,400 rebel forces each year for three years, according to Defense One, which first broke the news on the number of US specialists preparing for deployment.

News of the Pentagon’s mission to train Syrian rebels, some of whom are reported to be affiliated with terrorist organizations including al-Qaeda, has already attracted criticism from those who say the US military offensive against Islamic State forces in Syria, carried out without the consent of Damascus, is a thinly veiled effort to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.

Setting the stage for its most significant ruling ever on gay rights, the U.S. Supreme Court said Friday it would resolve the state-by-state battle over same-sex marriage.

The justices said they will decide cases from Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee, where state officials are defending laws that limit marriage to a man and a woman.

The high court is expected to hear arguments in late April and will probably issue a decision by the end of June.

The case could lead to a landmark ruling on whether gay and lesbian couples have a right to marry nationwide under constitutional protections for individual rights and equal treatment.

Another "coincidence": the latest Pew poll – the favorite of the Washington elites – lists "terrorism" as Americans’ top concern "for the first time in five years," just as the new Congress goes into session – and the presidential election pre-season begins.
[...]
This isn’t about free speech, at least not anymore: it’s about how to respond to an enemy that we created. No, we can’t go back in time and un-create ISIS, we can’t repeal the Iraq war or erase its tragic memory – and we can’t get rid of our own warmongers by simply deporting them to a desert isle where they could only bring harm to themselves. Although it’s not a bad idea, come to think of it.

We are going to have to live with the consequences of our government’s actions for many years to come, as the tides of religious and ethnic hatred batter the walls of our republic and transform it into something the Founders would neither recognize nor dream of. The great American ship of state cannot be turned around in a day, or even within the four-year term given to a President. The demons unleashed in the days and years after 9/11 – who were conjured well before then – will not be easily banished.

Yet it can be done. Those are war clouds on the horizon, but I also see rays of hope. Many are beginning to question our long march to permanent war, and many more will enter the ranks of the Peace Party in the years to come, if only we can learn to fight effectively. Yes, the polls tell us terrorism is on the minds of the American people, but they don’t say how we ought to meet this threat – and the idea that we should keep repeating the same failed policies fits the clinical definition of insanity to a tee.

CONCORD, N.H. – Rand Paul was winding down his day, talking to his fourth overflow crowd in eight hours. He’d started with state legislators who (mostly) had supported his father’s second presidential bid, in 2012. After a chat with the mayor of Manchester, he was off to talk with gun owners. He spun right around to talk to teachers about the threat of Common Core, and then he went up the highway to The Draft, a sports bar owned by the friendly State Senator Andy Sanborn, to address an assemblage of small businessmen.

At the bar, for the third time that day—totally unbidden—a potential voter asked him about militarization.

“I wanted to know if you thought the corporations that are selling weapons to the government are part of the problem,” asked Arnie Alpert, a Quaker activist wearing an NAACP badge on his tweed lapel.

The schism between Jeb and Mitt created an opening—and no one is in a better position to benefit than Paul, who says he’ll decide on a bid by March or April. New Hampshire has always been a key state for a Paul campaign. For most of the past decade, the state has attracted new libertarian-minded immigrants from other states, and elected new libertarian-minded legislators. They’re often the same people. The Free State Project, an effort to attract a critical mass of libertarians to one state and steer its life and politics, was organizing in New Hampshire long before Ron Paul ran for president. When Paul ran in 2008 and 2012, he grew a passionate base of volunteers.

“They were pretty symbiotic,” says Jason Sorens, the young Yale academic (now a professor at Dartmouth, fittingly) who dreamed up the Free State concept in 2001. “The Free Staters went from 500 to 1200 in the space of a couple of years, and there was a big boost to us from the Ron Paul movement.”

How big a boost? “I’ve tried to investigate this, actually,” says Sorens. “I looked at the correlation between Free Staters and the 2008 primary vote for Paul. For every one of them in a given town, there were two additional votes for him.”

After a tough vote, a new GOP attitude.

HERSHEY, Penn. — In New Hampshire yesterday, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul told a group of supportive Republican legislators that the country needed some immigration fixes. A few hours later, I asked whether, if elected president, Paul would move to overturn the Obama-era executive orders that have essentially legalized millions of immigrants.

"I’ve always been of the opinion that we should do things the proper way," Paul said. "I am in favor of doing immigration reform, but it should be done in the proper fashion." He cited the the need to tighten border security before attempting anything else, but added that "the 11 million, I think, are never going home, don’t need to be sent home, and I would incorporate them into our society by giving them work visas and making them taxpayers."