I've Fired The Times

I’ve fired The New York Times, etc.

Tibor R. Machan

For years I subscribed to The New York Times online.  Then I took the Sunday Times only for a couple of years but they managed to annoy me nearly as much as the daily edition.  (I still have the online version mainly so that I can check in on the latest balderdash by Paul Krugman and leave a comment busting his bubble once in awhile. (Of course, his head is far too big to ever pay attention to readers’ comments!)

In time I decided I want to see less and less of The Times in any form, so I subscribed to The New York Observer and The New York Sun.  I get both online as well as.  They are both more easily read, since they aren’t pretending to cover the universe and so readers can keep up with their offerings.

OK, so what’s the problem. Nothing much except that in a recent editorial in The New York Observer One of those critiques of impossible public policies is offered but without the proper moral high ground backing it.  This one, titled “It’s the Economy, Silly,” published in the February 25th issue, goes after Mr. Obama for his insistence that the minimum wage be raised, nationwide.  It points out a lot of problems with the idea of the minimum wage per se, how it leads to unemployment among the unskilled throughout the country, how it often bankrupts businesses that just cannot afford it, and how it mostly costs customers on whom the increased costs are of course dumped by businesses that cannot absorb the extra production cost imposed on them in this artificial way.

OK, then what is wrong?  Well, The New York Observer ends it proper and meaty critique with the following sheepish statement: “Mr. Obama’s goal of a prosperous work force is admirable.  But he must reconsider the best way of achieving it.” Wrong!

There is nothing admirable about the government even just trying to impose a wage policy upon businesses in a supposedly free market economy.  And I remember very clearly when Mr. Obama stood up during the first election campaign for the presidency and announce to the American people that contrary to his unfair critics, he is a champion of the free market. But of course he is nothing of the sort.

No one who advocates governments imposing labor costs or wages in any country could possibly be a champion of the free market system of economics.  It is a flat out contradiction to make that claim while advocating minimum wage laws and hikes! It’s akin to claiming to be opposed to slavery except from 4 to 11 PM every day!  

          What is worse is that none of the mainstream media identifies this outlook by the president and those who share his views as something bizarre and unjust, indeed tyrannical. Even the The New York Observer, with its pretty sensible economic philosophy, cannot bite the bullet and fess up to the fact that imposing a minimum wage on the country is morally vicious, reminiscent not of free market advocacy but of elements of the Soviet planned economy!