Employment

No free-labor market for Sen. Sanders

Sanders has shown signs in the past that he is less pro-immigration than some of his Democratic colleagues. In 2007, he was a major Democratic opponent of George W. Bush’s immigration reform bill, arguing that welcoming more guest workers would drive down wages for American workers.

Via Bernie Sanders Joins Donald Trump In Denouncing Higher Immigration @ The Libertarian Republic.

Looks great on paper

“The problem is that a higher legal minimum wage is at odds with the prevailing supply of and demand for labor. If you set the minimum too high, you will get a shortage of jobs. Forbidding employers from paying $9 or $12 an hour means that many of their workers won’t get $13 or $15…

Mandating less for those most in need

“In truth, there is only one way to regard a minimum wage law: it is compulsory unemployment, period. The law says: it is illegal, and therefore criminal, for anyone to hire anyone else below the level of X dollars an hour. This means, plainly and simply, that a large number of free and voluntary wage…

The GOP’s problem with free markets in labor

The GOP – the ever-larger nativist part of it – has never believed in free markets in labor when those markets might include immigrant-workers. Phyllis Schlafly’s a good example: she bluntly encourages the Republicans to solicit “white votes, the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election.” Can’t say she’s not a plain-speaking, race-limiting…

Jim DeMint’s No Libertarian (and he’s no honest man, either)

For those who wondered how Jim DeMint would fare at the Heritage Foundation, now you know: he’s taking a conservative think tank and putting it in the tank with dodgy studies against free markets in labor. How?  Start with a ludicrous, astronomically-high claim against immigration  and ignore the benefits entirely: The Heritage paper, chock-full of assumptions that most…

E-Verify’s a bad deal for businesses and worker

Funny, though, how biased government can be while holding hearings to consider E-Verify: Earlier today, there was a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on whether all employers nationwide should be required to use the employment verification system E-Verify to investigate the backgrounds of each new employee they hire. The hearing was erroneously titled “How…

Government employees’ broad speech rights in New Hampshire

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh writes about his discovery of a New Hampshire law that seems to provide broad speech protections to public employees of that state. Prof. Volokh writes that If taken seriously, this would protect from retaliation even insults (short of criminally punishable “fighting words”) of coworkers or customers, though I…