Tag Archives: Bernie Sanders

No one needed stuffed animals

From the Facebook page of Steve Horwitz:

Isn’t it interesting that Bernie Sanders (and GOOD FOR HIM for doing so) can give a speech at the religiously conservative Liberty University, where his views are absolutely noxious to those students and where being pro-choice effectively makes him a supporter of mass murder in their eyes, yet no one protested, and no one said they were unsafe, and no one was triggered, and no one needed stuffed animals to feel comfortable with this wicked man on campus?

There’s something seriously wrong with the students at elite colleges when Liberty University is a more liberal, open, tolerant, and civil place, not to mention having students who are better able to engage with intellectual diversity, than the Ivy League or the top liberal arts colleges or the top public universities.

[Yes, maybe those students are just more passive in general, but if you read accounts of the speech, they actually asked good questions and engaged him intellectually. You also don’t see THAT enough when the roles are reversed.]

A deeply, deeply stupid debate

From a great piece by Kevin D. Williamson at National Review.

Right now, we are embroiled in a deeply, deeply stupid debate over whether to raise the statutory minimum wage to $15 an hour. (I write “statutory minimum wage” because the real minimum wage is always and everywhere $0.00 an hour, as any unemployed person can confirm for you.) Because everything in the economy is in reality priced relative to everything else, using the machinery of government to monkey around with the number of little green pieces of paper that attaches to an hour’s labor manning the register at 7-Eleven or taking orders at Burger King is, necessarily, an exercise in futility. The underlying hierarchy of values — the relative weighting between six months’ work washing dishes and six months’ tuition at the University of Texas — is not going to change. Prices in markets are not arbitrary — they are reflections of how real people actually value certain goods and services in the real world. Arbitrarily changing the dollar numbers attached to those preferences does not change the underlying reality any more than trimming Cleveland off a map of the United States actually makes Cleveland disappear.