Politicians are loath to take bitter pills and will usually do whatever they can to cover-up systemic problems.

It is remarkable that at this late date, when Communism and socialism have been wholly discredited around the world, businessmen who run one of the world’s most respected companies, have created many thousands of jobs and vast amounts of wealth, and have paid taxes in amounts that are incomprehensible to the rest of us, are demonized for pointing out the obvious benefits of free enterprise.

The upshot is that immigration is a big net wealth transfer from foreigners to natives. Californians should keep this in mind the next time they tell themselves that mass deportation would turn their whole state around. If Californians really wanted to bring back the prices of 2007, they’d welcome Latin America with open arms.

OK. Let’s say you’ve shown me a market failure and then you propose a government solution. It was your reasoning about the incentives driving market participants that led to your conclusion that the market has failed. So we can’t drop reasoning about incentives in midstream. Let’s look at how government decision makers respond to incentives. And the result isn’t pretty.

This is a mistake we make over and over: thinking that we can create prosperity by imposing the forms of mature liberal democracies without the norms. Making an advanced market economy work requires an enormous amount of cultural and institutional capital. Pressure from outside forces can certainly help build up that capital. But ultimately, it’s not an order than can be imposed from outside; unless you first grow the institutions organically, neither markets nor democracy are going to work very well.

It is making me revise my understanding of the debate over minimum wages, for example. I have always thought that it’s a question of understanding economics versus not understanding economics. As Leonard argues, however, many eugencists understood that minimum wages would cause unemployment but saw this as a feature of the policy rather than a bug. It would make it easier to identify “defectives.” In addition, according to some eugenicists, “compulsory education and child labor bans…were desirable because the unfit poor would be unable to put their children to work and thus would have fewer children, a eugenic goal” (p. 218). It’s a very accessible paper that is worth a careful read. It tells a very dark story about our intellectual legacy, and it helps me understand the urgency with which scholars like Mises and Hayek wrote.

American leadership is reliable in one respect: it consistently undershoots my already low expectations.

There’s something about the union demonstrations in Madison, and the excitement it has caused on the left, that reminds me of the Tea Party. I think I’ve figured it out what it is. The advent of the labor movement is at the heart of the left’s sacred creation myth. The sense on the left that unions are under siege gives them something to fight for with a bracing sense of historically-rooted identity and moral authority. Similarly, the sense on the right that America’s foundational values are under siege gave the Tea Party something to fight for with a bracing sense of historically-rooted identity and moral authority. Of course, the Tea Party has about as much to do with the values of the American founding as John Adams has to do with Raytheon, and public-sector unionism has about as much to do with preventing worker exploitation as Eugene Debs has to do with unfireable $100,000 a year public-school teachers. But it’s nice to have a team, and a noble lineage, and to get out there and really give the bastards who are stealing our country hell.

Thankfully, and at long last, the citizens of many nations have taken matters into their own hands. Not all of these revolts will be viewed as a success to US interests. Some may not be viewed as a success by anyone. However, the results in aggregate, no matter what they are, will be far better than results of successive, misguided US policy missions in Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.

You want negotiating power? Get educated. Get a skill. What keeps wages up in a world of 7% unionization in the private sector is that I have alternatives. So stay in school and study something serious that has value alongside whatever else you’re interested in. Or study something interesting that has little market value. But if you do that, don’t complain about your low salary and lack of a union. The bottom line–you don’t need a union to protect you from your employer. You need alternatives–you need to have a skill that more than one employer values. If you have no skills, you are in trouble and the union won’t help you either except at the expense of other workers.