So Barack Obama wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour from its current $7.25 level. Is this a good idea? Many bloggers and economists will argue that lower wages mean more jobs and that this relationship is mathematically fixed and a basic fact of economics. They will seek to paint a picture in which all serious or reasonable people agree that higher wages will hurt business or stifle growth. I intend to show their line of reasoning to be overly simplistic and to question this consensus.
Author: Benjamin Studebaker
The Next Pope
So Pope Benedict XVI (whom I have written about previously) has decided to resign on account of declining health and old age. This poses an interesting question–who should the catholic church next select for its highest office? Naturally, I have a few ideas.
British Horse Hystericism
In the course of my trip (which I have been on since the 6th and will continue to be on until the 17th–blog posting, in the meantime, is consequently limited and intermittent), I have found myself watching news on television. This is something I do rarely, in no small part because TV news tends to be both repetitive and devoid of intellectual content. Very nearly every time I have turned on the news, whether it be the BBC or Sky, the story invariably has been about the fact that recently, there was some horse meat found in meat that was purported to be from cattle, not horses. The more I hear about this story, the more irrelevant it seems to me to be. Here’s why.
David Hume and God
Recently I have found myself reading 18th century Scottish David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in which Hume sets down his ideas concerning how he believes man reasons, thinks, and understands. In this book, I came across a very interesting argument which I feel well worth examining and discussing–Hume’s argument concerning the nature of god.
Small Government Democrats
I ran across an interesting hunk of data supplied by Paul Krugman that confirms what I have long suspected–American politics is no longer a contest between the progressive left and the conservative right; it is a mere feud between different conservatives. Let me show you what I mean.
Benjamin Studebaker 