we as a Society are seemingly about the complaining but not about the doing: “SOMEBODY’S GOTTA DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!!!”
The Setup:
From an economic point of view, to say that any group is systematically underpaid or systematically denied as much credit as they deserve is the same as saying that an opportunity for unusually high profit exists for anyone who will hire them or lend to them.
-Prof Thomas Sowell (Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?)
The Point:
This point, at once so obvious, is obviously overlooked in too many cases. How many are the professors, pundits, preachers, and politicians who insist that women as a group are underpaid? That blacks as a group are underpaid? That low-wage workers as a group are underpaid? That CEOs as a group are over-paid? That minorities as a group are denied adequate access to credit? Some of the people who so insist even claim to have empirical data to support their insistence. Yet almost none of these people act with their own resources on their words, despite in each case being able to personally profit from the alleged market imperfection.
Instead, people who assert that members of some group are systematically underpaid (or overpaid) issue their assertions as a means of prodding government to intervene by, say, imposing minimum-wage requirements (or caps on the incomes of employees who are allegedly overpaid). People who make such assertions, and who offer such policies, systematically fail to put their own money where their mouths are. This fact alone is sufficient to discredit the assertions issued by such people.
Somebody gotta do something, I don’t mind. What I DO mind is that people have been conditioned to run to Daddy Government FIRST when what they should be doing is taking care of the problem THEMSELVES.
The issue is clear. These people believe that Government really can solve all of Society’s ills and having it provide a living for “the underpaid”, by disrupting the labor marketplace either at the top or at the bottom, has shown itself to be a failure since the 1930s.
Yet, “good intentions” never seem to be realized with good outcomes. Yet, the American people keep thinking otherwise and not paying attention to what Einstein said about such thinking.
What we are doing, as a Society, is deciding to increase our dependence on Government (instead of putting Government back into its Constitutional box from whence it was spawned). Which, as history shows, will result in the Government enmeshing us more and more into its rules that will result in the loss of Liberty.
Instead of kvetching, as Sowell puts it, make those underpaid people average with your own money. Or even overpaid, if you are so willing to do so with your own money.
Until then, shut up – I’m tired of listening to you that have no input and no tangible “solution” of your own. I get enough complaining from my 5-year-old Grandson – you’re adults, solve your own problems!
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
