Category: Unintended Consequences
-
Minimum Wage, Minimum Rights
Minimum wage laws should be abolished. They are morally indefensible because they cause more harm than good. They are economic foolishness because they thwart the price signal that lets workers and employers arrive at the optimal price for labor. First, minimum wage laws increase unemployment. As I argued in a post on unions, it is…
-
Unintended Consequences to the max
I have several posts on unintended consequences of government policies, starting with one on November 27, 2010. (Click the Unintended Consequences category to see them all.) I just ran across a book that focuses exclusively on this topic and makes the point that some policies don\’t just have minor negative outcomes but actually lead to…
-
The Effect of Unions on Employment and Wages
We are seeing a lot of heated rhetoric here in Wisconsin about the governor and unions. The clearest treatment I have read of the effect of unions is Chapter 20 in Henry Hazlitt\’s book Economics In One Lesson. Jeffrey Miron, a Senior Lecturer at Harvard University and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, provides a…
-
The Great Depression – Plenty of Blame to Share
[This is part of a series, which is introduced in the posting titled \”Unintended Consequences\” here.] [Edited September 13, 2011] There are plenty of options for pointing to government policies and behavior that brought about the Great Depression, deepened it, and helped it to last much longer. The Gold Standard and France against the World.…
-
The Housing Crisis in the United States
[This is part of a series, which is introduced in the posting titled \”Unintended Consequences\” here.] There is a lot of blame to spread around for the housing crisis we are still experiencing and the accompanying financial crisis. The main stream stories mostly point at rapacious rich bankers. I don’t doubt that greed played a…
-
Unintended Consequences: legislation as the problem not the solution
Examples of government policies that produce significant unintended consequences.