Monochromatic Outlook

Bryan Caplan’s 20 January post at EconLog presents an interesting question of the sort that is often overheard at parties and coffeehouses as an example of a question that ought not be asked. How do you put a value on a human life?

The question comes up after some judge or jury awards damages in a wrongful death suit, or some news item in nature both lurid and legalistic.

Most Americans ought to be familiar with the recurring gag in the comic strip Peanuts in which every year Lucy offers to hold the football so that Charlie Brown can kick it. Each year, Charlie Brown complains that Lucy never acts in good faith and that she always pulls the ball away at the last minute, leaving poor Charlie Brown flat on his back after a flubbed kick attempt. Lucy invariably comes up with a compelling argument why Charlie Brown should trust her this time and Charlie Brown sees her logic and gives it a try. Predictably, he always winds up on his back.

I don’t usually make New Year’s Resolutions for a variety of reasons. For more on the subject, see Resolution Evolution by Jason McClain. However, this year I have a somewhat different tack. I’m committing myself not to a set of specific pass/fail tasks (make it to the gym every day) but to a more general goal: reduce my use of social media sites as my conduit to blogs.

I couldn’t make this up: unarmed man is charged for shooting spree.

It seems clear that we can no longer stand by as a nation while our friends and neighbors are slaughtered by the menace of unarmed people. I call on Congress to immediately draft legislation requiring:

I’m not sad to say goodbye to 2013. There were some accomplishments, but also many difficulties that I would rather not have to revisit. Though many of the difficulties won’t magically disappear with the turning of a calendar’s page, the arrival of the new year nevertheless does seem to come with a sense that there could be a fresh start, that perhaps some of the previous year’s failures and disasters can be left behind.

There are no topics about which reasonable people cannot find disagreement. In the end one may be right and the other wrong, but this does not make either unreasonable.

Of course, not all disagreements are reasonable. However, if you find yourself thinking someone else is unreasonable because they don’t agree with you, the other person might not be the unreasonable one in the conversation.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the minimum wage and how it ought to be raised. It has been claimed that minimum wage workers are making less now than ever and that the nation is in a critical race to the bottom where workers on the low end of the spectrum are getting squeezed harder and harder.

This raises the question of the historical minimum wage in the United States. Is it really lower now than it ever has been? Did America once have a minimum wage that elevated workers from poverty?