QUORA: ‘Why are the laws called "Right to Work" when in fact they are really "No Right to Work", since they permit an employee to be fired with no reason given and usually no recourse?'

 QUORA: ‘Why are the laws called "Right to Work" when in fact they are really "No Right to Work", since they permit an employee to be fired with no reason given and usually no recourse?

I posted this answer:

I would make the issue clearer by reversing the question: “Why should an employee be permitted to quit a job with no reason given and leave the employer no recourse?” An employer need not give a reason to fire an employee, just as an employee need not give a reason to quit a job. Why should either have to justify their action to anyone? If it’s in one’s best interest, they are free to do it. Both, in fact, have a recourse (in a free, or even in today’s semi-free, market): The fired employee can seek another job, and the employer can hire another worker. An employer who fires a worker is not violating his right to work. Leaving aside prior contractual agreements, the former employee is free to seek work elsewhere. 

Right to Work laws are not literally about the right to work, which is a moral right. The right to work means only that each individual has the right to work to support himself. It does not mean that someone must supply him with employment. 

In actuality, Right to Work laws say nothing about whether or not an employer needs a reason to fire an employee. Right to Work laws are a reaction to compulsory unionization laws, mainly The Wagner Act. That 1935 Wagner Act compels union membership of all associated workers, even if against their will, and compels employers to negotiate with the unions through collective bargaining even if against the company’s will. Right to Work laws, which were authorized by the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, outlaw union-only shops, even if the company and union voluntarily agree. I understand the impetus for Right to Work laws. Nonetheless, I believe both laws—the Wagner Act and Right to Work statutes—are rights-violating and should be repealed. I wrote an op-ed for The Objective Standard explaining my reasons. 

Related Reading:

End “Collective Bargaining Rights” and “Right-to-Work” Laws

The Future of Organized Labor Should Be Volunterism

 Law-Favored Unions are Quasi-Criminal Organizations

Fast-Food Workers Seek Government Guns to Back Demands

QUORA: ‘What does economics have to say about the statement “If a company can’t afford to pay their workers a living wage, they shouldn't be in business.”?

 QUORA: ‘What does economics have to say about the statement “If a company can’t afford to pay their workers a living wage, they shouldn't be in business.”? Is that an economically sound argument?’

I posted this answer:

By “they shouldn't be in business,” does the questioner imply that anyone who doesn’t think the employees are not being paid what he imagines equals a “living wage” can physically threaten or attack the business and its owners, including the use of violence, unless they raise the wages or close the business? Or by “they shouldn't be in business,” does the questioner mean they shouldn't be legally allowed to be in business?  If the first, you are a criminal. If the second, you are worse than a common criminal; you are a fascist.

I don’t think economics has anything to say about this statement, because this is a moral, not an economic, statement. Economics is the science that studies production and trade. Morality covers individual rights, which underlies the premise of the question. (economics and morality are actually integrated, but in modern thinking they are not.)

A job is a two-way street. It is a mutual, voluntary agreement between employer and employee. A worker is entitled to compensation he agreed to, and what the employer agreed to pay him. An employer is entitled to a worker’s labor only according to the compensation a worker agreed to accept. If a worker agrees to work for something less than what some busybody calls a living wage, it’s the worker’s business, no one else’s. It would be immoral for any outside interest to force any labor contract agreement on unwilling parties. 

“Living wage” is a political, not economic, term. When an employer and employee agree to an employment agreement, it is none, and shouldn’t be any, of anybody else’s business, including the government. The premise “If a company can’t afford to pay their workers a living wage, they shouldn't be in business” is neither an economically nor morally sound argument.

Related Reading:

Taking vs. Earning a "Livable Wage"

Tuesday’s ‘Fight for $15’ is about Imposing Demands by Government Aggression

Earned Pay vs. Need-Based Pay--or, Justice vs. Injustice

"Greed" is a Two-Way Street

If We’re to Have Labor Laws, Should They Work Both Ways?

"Greed" is a Two-Way Street

Business vs. Workers' Jobs: Who Makes Who Possible?

Minimum Wage Doesn't Belong in the Constitution--or Law

Earned Pay vs. Need-Based Pay--or, Justice vs. Injustice

A couple of years ago, major bank CEOs appeared before a Congressional committee. One CEO, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, was asked a stupid question by an ignorant Congresswoman, Katie Porter. According to CNN,

Freshman Rep. Katie Porter stumped multimillionaire JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon during a hearing Wednesday with a simple question: How are workers supposed to make ends meet?

The back-and-forth occurred during a House Financial Services Committee hearing featuring the CEOs of several major banks on Wednesday. Porter, a California Democrat, shared the story of a JPMorgan Chase employee – making a fraction of what the company’s top executives are paid – who is running a $567 deficit each month because her salary is insufficient to cover basic expenses.

“How should she manage this budget shortfall while she’s working full-time at your bank?” Porter asked Dimon.

Dimon’s answer was basically that he’d have to think about, and would need to check the math. The hypothetical employee’s salary is $16.50 per hour, plus benefits. Porter used the exchange to demand that Dimon’s bank pay employees enough to make ends meet, regardless of any other considerations. 

With Dimon’s disappointing response leaving much to be desired, Michael Dahlen, writing for The Objective Standard, suggested How Jamie Dimon Should Have Answered Representative Katie Porter. 

As you’d expect from TOS, Dahlen suggested a good, hard-hitting moral and economic lesson to Congresswoman Porter. I give Dahlen a thumbs up. But I thought I’d take a crack at an answer myself. I composed my rough draft before reading Dahlen’s article, just to compare for myself. I must say, I think I did a very credible job. Here is my “How Jamie Dimon Should Have Answered Representative Katie Porter”:

First, let me say that a job is a two-way street. It’s based on mutual self-interest. We, as an employer with particular concerns, have as much right to do what’s best for our business as the employee has to do what’s best for herself in the context of her life and concerns. Ideally, both can find common ground and advance our respective interests together by the prospective employee accepting our job offer.

As to our policy, the employee is paid according to her productive contribution to our business, not her needs. As she gains knowledge, skills, and experience, she has the opportunity to advance in pay and position. In the meanwhile, she’ll have to figure out how to get by. Her life is her responsibility. 

We do “provide a way for families to make ends meet.” We offer jobs--good paying jobs with opportunity for advancement. But we don’t give handouts. If we pay people by need, rather than productiveness and competence, then soon enough there will be no business and the jobs, including mine, will be gone. Then how will she make ends meet? If a person doesn’t have to earn her pay, and instead get paid according to whatever she claims are her needs, then all incentive to excel at her job evaporates--along with the incentive of all of the other employees, whose competence suddenly doesn’t matter, only their needs.

Yes, I make vastly more money than her. That’s because my responsibilities and productiveness are vastly greater than hers. In fact, hers and the jobs of all 250,000+ JP Morgan employees depend on my ability to do my job competently. The only just and objective method of setting pay rates for all of these employees is merit, as judged by management and, ultimately, the judgment of the market; i.e., our customers, the ultimate end of our business. Anything other than a merit-based standard will ultimately result in inferior products, harm to our customers, and finally the loss of our customers. Need is neither just nor objective as a standard, and thus is not rational or sustainable. 

I started by emphasizing that a job is a two-way street. And as it turns out, such a relationship of mutual self-interest turns out to be win-win. Both sides advance their own well-being, based on mutual agreement. Our employees' jobs depend on a fair and rational pay policy just as much as our business does. 

I wish more businessmen would stand up for their right to exist, not just on economic grounds, but on moral grounds as well

Related Reading:

No Conflict Between People and Business

"Greed" is a Two-Way Street

If We’re to Have Labor Laws, Should They Work Both Ways?

Is ‘Common Good Capitalism’ a One-way Street?

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 1

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 2

Quora: ‘Is capitalism based on the exploitation of others?’

 Quora: ‘Is capitalism based on the exploitation of others?’

I posted this answer:

Absolutely! 

When entrepreneurs expend time, energy, and resources to start, build, and run businesses, aspiring workers who fill the jobs these businesspersons create exploit the business for wages and salaries. In doing so, thay drain off sales revenues, cutting deeply into the business profits of the owners.

In the pre-Capitalist era, before wage labor, self-sustaining workers pocketed 100% of their sales revenues as profits. When Capitalism’s free market unleashed society’s most highly visionary, motivated, and productive workers—the economy’s Prime Movers, the people whom Karl Marx and his followers deny exist—the explosion of wage-paying jobs they created cut those net pre-tax profit margins from 100% down to today’s average of around 10%. 

The result of the rise of advanced industry under Capitalism was the explosion of exploitation by wage labor of the capitalist business Prime Movers. So, yes, Capitalism is most assuredly based on the exploitation of others.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I offer this answer with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. Workers, of course, no more exploit business by accepting their wage-paying jobs than business exploits workers by hiring them for wages to contribute to the business’s productive mission, as the fool Karl Marx falsely claimed. 

For a more thorough discussion of how this is so, see my answer to the Quora question, “What are the practical proofs that the profits arise from labour [sic] which produces surplus value? I recommend only positive answers in favour of labour [sic] being a source of value.”

Capitalism, in fact, is the anti-exploitation social system, if by “exploitation” we mean taking unfair advantage of another—because Capitalism is based on equality of moral agency; individual rights (and the corollary respect for the rights of others); trade (win-win relationships, including employment arrangements); the outlawing of private and governmental force except in self-defense (voluntarism); and the rule of objective law under a constitutionally limited government that does nothing else but secures these rights.

Related Reading:

QUORA: ‘What are the practical proofs that the profits arise from labour which produces surplus value?'

 QUORA: 'How is becoming a billionaire even possible, chronologically?'

Marx and His Exploitation Theory BY GEORGE REISMAN 

Atlas Shrugged—Ayn Rand

To Whom Does the American Worker Owe His Prowess?

Did Unions Create the Middle Class?

‘Reopening’ the Economy: It’s Not ‘Money vs. lives,’ or Even ‘Money or Lives’

Since President Trump began talking about “reopening the economy” as quickly as possible, the charge that Trump (and presumably other politicians like the governors of six northeastern states) is more concerned with money than saving lives has been making the rounds. But are people who charge Trump with “putting money over lives” being fair? Should our political leaders be concerned with COVID-19 to the exclusion of any concern for the damage the shutdown is inflicting on what we call “the economy?”

This charge strikes me as cold-blooded. The economy is the field of activity in which people work and trade in support of their lives and flourishing. The lifeblood of the economy is money, the means by which people trade. Just as you are dead without your blood, so the economy is dead without money. Money nourishes the economy, and is just as important in sustaining our lives as blood is in sustaining our bodies. Money is our means to physical well-being. Money represents productiveness. Money is our access to all of the myriad goods and services that we need and desire but that others produce. This includes what we need to protect our health. What is it that we’re counting on to beat the virus? The ability of researchers and companies to produce treatments, testing, vaccines, medical devices, etc., and get it to the people who need it. What makes this healthcare progress work? The lifeblood of the economy--money. 

Additionally, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that money, like blood, plays a vital role in nourishing our souls and our individual identities. Millions of people have seen their goals and livelihoods and very lives turned upside down by the pandemic shutdown. Not all of us are affected in the same way. For some of us, the shutdown is more an inconvenience than a hardship. But for tens of millions of previously productive people, the suffering must be intense; People whose businesses represent a lifetime investment of time and money at risk of going “up in smoke”, younger people just starting out seeing their careers stalled, people with little savings who are living paycheck-to-paycheck suddenly without a paycheck, peoples' ability to take care of their families crippled. Is it so wrong to consider their plights?

I would say anyone who disparages political leaders who are keeping the economy front and center of their concerns cannot claim to be concerned with lives. Concern for money and concern for the sick are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they cannot be separated. It’s not “Money over lives,” or even “Money or Lives.” It’s money and lives, because money--or, more precisely, the root of money, productive economic activity--is life. Ultimately, as was recently pointed out by a Princeton bioethicist, The 'False Debate' About Reopening the Economy Is the One That Ignores the Enormous Human Cost of Sweeping COVID-19 Control Measures:

We are currently impoverishing the economy, which means we are reducing our capacity in the long term to provide exactly those things that people are talking about that we need—better health care services, better social-security arrangements to make sure that people aren't in poverty. There are victims in the future, after the pandemic, who will bear these costs. The economic costs we incur now will spill over, in terms of loss of lives, loss of quality of life, and loss of well-being.

Despite his crudeness, I believe Trump and other politicians who are giving serious thought to revitalizing economic activity, even as they remain concerned as COVID-19 continues to rage, are the ones who have their priorities straight. There is much more to the COVID-19 crisis than only the people that are seriously ill with coronavirus. There is the moral "commandment" First, do no harm. Only those with a balanced approach to social policy are actually putting lives first.

Related Reading:

“Francisco’s Money Speech”, from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Healthcare and the Role of Money

Money vs. Wealth: Which is the Cart, and Which is the Horse? Ask Gilligan

Ayn Rand on a Modern Dollar Bill? Who Better Deserves the Honor?

Related Viewing:

What Is Our Covid-19 Goal? | Alex Epstein

Another One-Way Labor Law

N.J. becomes first state to mandate severance for workers if they are part of a mass layoff. So read an article headline in the New Jersey Star-Ledger by Samantha Marcus. She wrote:

The law (S3170) requires that New Jersey employers with at least 100 employees provide their workers 90 days notice — up from 60 — before a large layoff or a plant closing or transfer that will put at least 50 people out of work. It would also force these businesses to pay their workers one week’s severance for every year of service. The payout increases by an additional four weeks if the employer doesn’t comply with the 90-day notification rules.

“When these corporate takeover artists plunge the companies into bankruptcy they walk away with windfall profits and pay top executives huge bonuses, but the little guys get screwed,” state Sen. Joe Cryan, D-Union, who sponsored the bill, said in a statement. “The law will now be upgraded to better protect the rights of the employees. Workers’ performance and workers’ dedication to the company were secondary. Now, hopefully, they’ll be moved more to the forefront.”

I posted these comments:

Gallup reports that Millennials are “the Job-Hopping Generation” who feel “unattached to organizations and institutions” that employ them. The Financial Times reports it’s nothing new—“Job-hopping millennials’ are no worse than their elders.”

With that much quitting, why shouldn’t labor law be a two-way street? If businesses are legally required to give 90 days notice before letting employees go, followed by hefty severance pay, shouldn’t simple fairness put the same requirements on the “little guys?” What about the rights of business owners? What about business performance? What happens when business dedication to its workers becomes secondary to the worker who quits for better job opportunities?

Many more workers quit than are fired. Gallup shows that 45-60% of workers “are open to a different job opportunity” and 21-36% “will look for a job with a different organization in the next 12 months.” In other words, many more businesses “get screwed” by “little guys” than “little guys get screwed” by businesses. So why does the new law only apply to business? Shouldn’t the basic American principle of Equal Protection of the Law impose the same obligation on the worker?

For the record, I oppose these types of labor laws, unless they involve fraud, breach-of-contract, and like criminal activity. Never mind that the law applies only to “mass layoffs.” To any individual worker, a layoff is a layoff. If we’re going to have these laws, it should be applied fairly.

Related Reading:

If We’re to Have Labor Laws, Should They Work Both Ways?

"Greed" is a Two-Way Street

Bernie Sanders’s Unjust Triple Tax Proposal

The upcoming midterm elections are more than ever a choice between capitalism and socialism. All elections from here on will be. So, it’s a good time to analyze some proposals by the man who brought socialism squarely into the political forefront.

Bernie Sanders proposed a tax on businesses to cover federal welfare payments any of their employees may receive. According to Business Insider:

Senator Bernie Sanders intends to introduce legislation that would require large companies like Amazon to pay a tax to cover the cost of federal assistance for their employees, The Washington Post reports. The intention is to incentivize large corporations to pay a fair living wage.

The bill would set a 100% tax on government assistance received by workers at companies with 500 or more employees. For example, if an Amazon worker were to get $300 in food stamps, Amazon would be taxed $300. Sanders intends to introduce the bill in the Senate on September 5. [It was introduced.]

So get this. Food Stamps and other welfare payouts are forced by government on the taxpayers who fund it. Shareholders, the owners of Amazon and other companies, already pay for these programs through their taxes. In fact, they pay double--first on profits their company earns via the corporate income tax, and again as individuals through personal income taxes on dividends and taxes on capital gains on their stock. Owners of Amazon already pay double tax, some of which goes to pay for these government programs. Now, Sanders wants to tax them a third time for their company’s crime of hiring people at a mutually agreed-upon compensation that happens to be at a level politicians like Sanders believes entitles them to cash in on welfare programs imposed on taxpayers by these very same politicians!

Sanders’s proposed welfare business tax is a gross miscarriage of justice.

Furthermore, as noted by many economists, it is a jobs tax. Sanders’s proposal would tax low-wage jobs, disincentivizing companies from hiring low-wage workers. By killing low-wage jobs, this would make it that much harder for inexperienced people to enter the workforce. Is Sanders just ignorant on economics? Hardly. He is ready with his federal jobs guarantee proposal, which proposes to guarantee a high-paying job to anyone unable to find work in the private sector. Sanders is disingenuous, having it both ways. Either companies pay higher taxes, which he loves. Or they kill jobs, sending more people into government dependency. Either way, Bernie Sanders the socialist wins. Either way, productive taxpayers lose, along with another piece of our freedom as the private economy is further crippled.

Keep in mind that Bernie Sanders is an admitted socialist. He is only interested in moving America step by step into totalitarianism. It’s what socialists do, because that is what socialism is. Sanders is a Democrat, a political party increasingly open about its socialist designs on America. Keep this in mind as you go to the polls.

Related Reading:

Socialism vs. Welfare Statism: Why These Terms Matter

Sanders' Brand of Socialism is Old Fashioned Fascism

Sanders’s Open Socialism Blows the Cover Off of the Left’s Stealth Socialism

A is A, and Socialism by any Other Name...

China’s Recovery from Socialism vs. Bernie Sanders, The Most Evil Politician in America

QUORA: ‘Given that I live in a capitalist society, how can I avoid having my labor exploited?’

QUORA: ‘Given that I live in a capitalist society, how can I avoid having my labor exploited?’

I left this answer:

The answer is simple: Avoid exploiting employers for a paycheck.

The great thing about living in a capitalist society—to the extend we have a capitalist society (see Crawford below)—is that you are free to choose your associations based on your own self-interest. This includes your economic associations. Since nature imposes upon man the requirement to work to survive, capitalism is good (morally and economically) because it gives you the freedom to choose the best deal for your labor among many options. If you don’t want to be “exploited”—i.e. work for someone—you can create your own job by starting your own business.

Of course, then you run into the problem of having the labor you expend in building and running your business exploited by your employees for a paycheck and your customers for a product. But at least you can then exploit them back, by expecting labor from your employees and payment from your customers!

By now the absurdity of the question is obvious. A capitalist society is by definition the opposite of exploitation; that is, it is a system of universal voluntary cooperation. Unlike socialism—the forced exploitation of all by all—capitalism is based on voluntary trade, not slave labor and profiteers on slave labor. Under capitalism, you can just say no to “exploitation”—to any trade, association, or cooperation that you deem disadvantageous or “exploitative”. Try saying no to a socialist program—say, to Social Security, in which case you’ll end up in prison; or to collectivization (government takeover) of your farm, in which case you’ll end up dead.

Capitalism won’t relieve you of the necessity to work, any more than capitalism can relieve you of the effects of gravity. The law of gravity and the law of work or die are both irrevocable laws of nature. What capitalism will give you is freedom from physical coercion from any source, and the right to keep the product of your labor. Capitalism is voluntarism. Socialism in all of its manifestations grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Related Reading:

Who are the Real Job Creators? Hint: It's Not the 99%

Atlas Shrugged—Ayn Rand

What is Capitalism?, essay and audio, from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal—Ayn Rand

To Whom Does the American Worker Owe His Prowess?

Productivity, Not Labor unions, Created the Middle Class

The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire—Andrew Bernstein

Mandatory Paid Sick Leave for NJ? NO!

Now that New Jersey again has a “progressive” Democrat in the governor’s office, Phil Murphy, the push for a law mandating paid sick time off statewide for all private sector employees is back on the front legislative burner—and almost certain to be passed. Of course, the NJ Star-Ledger is all in on the scheme. Here are a few relevant passages from the S-L editorial:

Take another look at the lunch lady serving you that sandwich tomorrow. She may not be one of the 18,000 people who have contracted the flu this season in New Jersey, but given that two-thirds of adults in low-paying jobs usually go to work when they have the flu - mostly because they cannot afford to lose a payday - you probably just beat the odds.

In New Jersey, there are 1.2 million workers who do not have access to paid sick leave - that's 38 percent of our private sector workforce - despite the existence of sick leave ordinances in 13 cities and towns, with Jersey City igniting this prudent trend back in 2013.

The bill currently calls for one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked, with a max of 5 to 9 sick days earned, depending on the size of the company.

Consider what we've learned locally: Between January 2014 and July 2015, 9 communities - Jersey City, Newark, Passaic, Irvington, East Orange, Paterson, Montclair, Trenton and Bloomfield - enacted paid sick leave. In the first year of implementation, unemployment actually decreased in 8 of those 9 communities - and in Paterson's case, it dropped by 3 percent. The outlier was Bloomfield, and that increase was meager (from 5.5 to 5.8).

"We talked to these mayors," [Senate Majority Leader Loretta] Weinberg said, "and none of these towns went out of business."

This is just an academic exercise, as this bill is almost certain to pass. Nonetheless, I can’t help myself. So, I left these comments:

This is an immoral bill. The state has no legitimate power to enforce any one-size-fits-all labor law, including mandatory sick pay. This is a voluntary private contract matter between employer and employee. Each employer has the right to set his own terms of employment, including how to handle sick employees.

It may be the case that 38% of employees work for businesses that don’t have a formal sick pay policy. But that doesn’t mean this many employees don’t get paid to take the day off if they are truly sick. I have a friend who started a computer business in the 1980s, which eventually grew into a thriving business of dozens of employees (which he eventually sold for retirement). Years ago, near the beginning of his business, he told me about his policy on sick pay. He did not believe in a set number of sick days per employee. His policy was: If you are sick, stay home. Don’t come in and infect everyone else. I’ll pay you. The anecdote about the lunch lady is a straw man. The bigger problem is people taking sick days for purposes other than being sick. My friend avoided the problem of people taking days off just to “use up” the sick days. Knowing that they’d be paid, yet being “on their honor,” my friend found that nobody takes advantage (if anyone did, they’d be gone). Under Weinberg’s proposed bill, his policy would be outlawed. It’s not right.

On the other side of the issue, many workers may rather have a higher take-home pay than the paid sick days. I belong to a plumbers union. We fund our own benefits, like pension and health insurance, through union trust funds. In my 46 year working career, we never voted to create a sick day fund. We could have. It was discussed. The majority didn’t want it. We preferred the higher paycheck. In essence, each member was self-insured to cover unpaid sick time off out of their own savings. Why should the union membership be forced to fund a sick pay account they don’t want? Because some “progressive” politicians say so, and claims the right to force it on them? Because the Star-Ledger says so? By what right?

As to those city employment statistics, that’s plain disingenuousness. Many factors affect business and jobs. As to those mandatory sick pay ordinances—municipal tyranny if there ever is—it can just as easily be argued, and with much better justification, that business activity and employment would be higher in those towns if not for the extra cost of mandatory sick pay. Nothing is without cost.

Business owners and employees have the right to deal with sickness in their own way, by their own judgment and choice and by voluntary mutual agreement. If a businessperson wants to pay sick employees. Fine. If not, fine also. If a business owner doesn’t want a sick waitress serving customers, the owner can have her not work that day, with or without pay. If an employee doesn’t want to trade a lower wage for sick pay (that “one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked” has to be funded somehow), it’s her right to seek a job that doesn’t have these expensive fringe benefits. If an employee doesn’t like the terms of employment, he can negotiate a change or leave for another job. Just as an employee doesn’t have the “right” to paid sick days, so an employer doesn’t have the “right” to force an employee to stay on under terms he doesn’t agree with. This is not just a practical matter. It’s a moral issue; an issue of individual rights and a government’s job to protect those rights—including the rights to free trade and contract—equally across the board. The state has no moral right to dictate sick pay policy.

Related Reading:

Nothing Earned About Mandated "Earned Sick Time"

Paid Sick Leave, No Matter How ‘Beneficial,’ Should Never Be Legally Mandated in Any Way

‘Mandatory Paid Sick Leave” is Immoral and Economically Destructive

Mandatory Paid Sick Time: Economically Destructive because Morally Wrong

Martin Luther King: Right On Racial Justice, Wrong On ‘Economic Justice’

In support of the adoption of a $15 minimum wage in New Jersey, the NAACP invoked Martin Luther King. Richard T. Smith, president of the NAACP New Jersey State Conference, had this to say in a May 2016 New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column ( N.J. NAACP president: For economic justice raise the minimum wage):

Some ask if the minimum wage battle is the new civil rights movement.

The topic has received new attention this month, as leaders of the legislature renewed their push to raise New Jersey's minimum wage to a more equitable $15 per hour.

It's natural for people to feel the need to draw comparisons between hotly contested topics. But in this case, I think the question only draws unnecessary distinctions.

Racial and economic justice are, and forever will be, intertwined. History can be a useful guide when it comes to drawing the connections.

Martin Luther King Jr. is a national hero for helping end racial segregation in the United States. Yet he spent the last years of his life working as much for economic justice as for racial justice.

I left these comments, edited for clarity:

Martin Luther King was either right in his fight for political justice—which he backed up by drawing upon the principles in the Declaration of Independence—or he was right about government-imposed economic “justice,” which violated the Declaration’s principles of political equality before the law. But he couldn’t be right about both, because they are mutually exclusive.

King was right only about political justice; all men are created equal possessing inalienable individual rights—rights being understood as guarantees to freedom of action to pursue personal advancement, not automatic claims on economic rewards that others must be forced to provide against their will.

“Economic justice” as meant by the likes of the NAACP is not justice at all. There is no justice in forcing employers to pay more than they are willing. There is no justice in denying any individual the right to work for any wage he is willing to accept. There is no justice in forcing employers to pay or legally granting to employees wage raises not earned. There is no justice in overriding the rights of employers and job seekers to voluntarily negotiate mutually beneficial, mutually agreed-upon compensation agreements. There is no justice in outlawing jobs; any jobs.

Minimum wage and similar laws and regulations are unjust and immoral, because based on legalized armed aggression by government against private individuals for the unearned benefit of other individuals. There is no justice in cronyism. There is no justice in aggressive force: Justice belongs to voluntary agreement only. Such laws are anti-justice, anti-individual rights, anti-Declaration of Independence, and anti-“I Have a Dream.”

In actuality, there is a very necessary “distinction” between racial and Smith’s version of “economic justice.”

There is no conflict between economic and political justice, properly understood. In fact, they are corollaries. Consistent adherence to the principles of the Declaration of Independence leads inexorably to freedom of contract regarding compensation, where each side negotiates from the standpoint of each own’s pursuit of her personal pursuit of happiness, each dealing with the other by voluntary mutual agreement rather than force. Force is the enemy of voluntarism and thus freedom and individual rights. When aggressive, initiatory force enters the economic equation—in any form, including the legal kind—economic justice, and justice of any kind, necessarily retreats.

“Racial and economic justice are, and forever will be, intertwined,” Smith says. No, they’re not—not in the way he means. When King fought to rid the country of legally enforced racial segregation, under which black Americans were cut off from broader society, he was enforcing racial justice based on the equality of rights laid down in the Declaration. Minimum wage laws, on the other hand, are a form of legally enforced economic segregation, where lower skilled/inexperienced workers are cut off from the broader economy because jobs they qualify for have been outlawed. There is a clear distinction between racial and Smith’s concept of “economic justice.” In reality, economic and racial segregation are corollaries. Likewise, political and economic freedom are corollaries. It’s either/or.

Related Reading:

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. For His Moral Ideals Rather Than His Politics

King's "Economic Equality" Legacy: Not Forgotten, but Tried—and Failed

The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire—Andrew Bernstein  

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal—Ayn Rand