Friday, December 25, 2015

Kentucky Lowers The Minimum Wage



Newly elected Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has reversed former Govenor Beshear’s move to raise the state’s minimum wage for government workers and contractors to $10.10 an hour, bringing it back down to $7.25 an hour.

While cutting the pay of government employees is always a good thing, Bevin seems to want to do even more. In the order, Bevin hinted that he would prefer the state have no minimum wage at all: “Wage rates ideally would be established by the demands of the labor market instead of being set by the government,” he said.

“The minimum wage stifles job creation and disproportionately impacts lower skilled workers seeking entry-level jobs,” Bevin wrote in his executive order.

Bevin could become one of the most significant governors in decades. He understands free market economics and has an appreciation of liberty,

(Note: When he sought the Republican nomination for the US senate against establishment crony Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul supported McConnell.)

 -RW 


(via Think Progress)

12 comments:

  1. Good, hopefully his plan as stated here, goes through

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  2. Wow. Great news. Bevin.... Diogenes, if still around, might just have swung his lamp in the governor's direction.

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  3. This is exciting. I will keep an eye on him. Thanks and Merry Christmas!

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    1. Gold Is The Money Of The Future: Gilder's 21st Century Case For Gold

      Markets are an information system. Hayek saw that. Money is the channel. Prices are the message. If money is based on a stable unit, then fluctuations in price must be signals. Price increases convey downstream some piece of information from upstream, for example an increase in demand. But if the unit of account fluctuates, then how can one disentangle channel from signal? Is a price increase an increase in demand for a product or is it a devaluation of currency? The entrepreneur is reduced to some form of guessing. Maybe house prices are rising because more people simply want more and bigger houses. If so, then expansion is the wise course of action. But what if house prices are going up because mortgage markets were the place where newly created money first touched down in the economy? If so, then there is a bubble in the housing market. If this is the case, expansion is risky.

      The case for gold was always stronger than the case for fiat currencies, but information theory adds strength to strength, and more clearly reveals the superiority of a stable monetary unit. Stable money is the only way to distinguish noise from signal. And not only does information technology require the proper distinction between noise and signal within the technology system, it also requires clear signaling in the financing of technology from outside the system. Technology tends to require longer time horizons for profitability and therefore it requires clearer signal. This is especially true of the single most important price signal the economy offers: the interest rate. When noise drowns out the signal, then long-range planning becomes impossible. Time frames contract. Investment becomes more of a zero-sum game, based on who can move the fastest, or who has access to the largest economies of scale, or most importantly, who has access to the fiat money spigot.

      JERRY: The government can’t take hours or years from me and give them to you or vice versa.

      GILDER: Yeah. But that’s what it’s doing. That’s a very good — but when it divorces money from time, you know canceling out interest rates, for example — interest rates are the time value of money, or whatever — so when you have zero interest rates, essentially, you are nullifying the information about time that money ordinarily conveys.

      So what happens is, when money is divorced from time, is the people who manipulate money with gigahertz computers, or whatever, can actually do fine. And you have this huge expansion of commerce in the econ — I mean, finance, financialization of the economy, a hypertrophy of finance.

      But meanwhile the people who are caught back in the time economy, the people who are paid by the hour, or by the month, are — can’t benefit. So you have this — what’s depicted as egregious inequality arising. But this is really the result of financialization, the hypertrophy of finance that results from the government campaign to nullify the time factor in money.

      http://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2015/12/23/gold-is-the-money-of-the-future-gilders-21st-century-case-for-gold/4/


      so in a fiat system he just created more inequality b/c those workers costs are not going down.

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    2. This is a pet peeve of mine. This comment has nothing to do with the post. What is it doing here? It's like the guy who calls in to the radio show even though he hasn't been listening, and asks a question that has nothing to do with the conversation.

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    3. You know what my pet peeve is? Everyone pushing lower labor costs while maintaining a crony fiat system. Let the markets clear, naturally.


      This is the problem:
      But meanwhile the people who are caught back in the time economy, the people who are paid by the hour, or by the month, are — can’t benefit. So you have this — what’s depicted as egregious inequality arising. But this is really the result of financialization, the hypertrophy of finance that results from the government campaign to nullify the time factor in money.




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  4. another move by Rand Paul to be accepted by the mainstream, thus not attack his US Pres. campaign.
    Dave, see Forward-USA.org

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  5. Looks like Bevin has already done more good for the cause of liberty than Rand Paul. Here's hoping for a lot more from him...

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  6. Rand has so much more power in Senate than 8 year throne. If he would partner with Bevin, Kentucky would be a great place to live!

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  7. This is how liberty is actually achieved. Classical liberals need to seek office, not seek to abolish government.

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    1. Why can it be both? Hazlitt said in Man vs The Welfare State that libertarians should attack at all angles.

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  8. Kentucky is already a great place to live, dumping B-sher and electing Bevin is icing on the cake of like.

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