http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwAQwItEjUo
I admit I haven't looked too much into her argument, but plan to when I finish running some errands. I was hoping for someone to easily destory her argument on this thread by refuting her measurement of productivty.
I look forward to the responses on this one.
well it all comes back to subjective value and private property rights. I can envision a coercive political system I would approve of, because the system would appropriate other people's wealth and use it to produce things that I value. I think this is a useful exercise for all of you anarchists, you can always offer a counterpart to someone else's sytem that gives you what you value.
She didn't measure anything, that's kind of the point.
Some study claimed there was an increase in the average worker's productivity since 1968, and with that in mind she made the erroneous assumption that workers at the minimum wage level contributed at least as equally (if not more) to that rise in productivity as other workers in the economy.
There's also a subtle implication that she thinks that there are people who were making the minimum wage in 1968 who are still only making the minimum wage today.
+1 myhumangetsme
I should also like to point out that there are competitive disadvantages caused by companies, disequilibrium problems through trade, shitty state-manipulated education, and increases in poor-producing groups, I.E groups on welfare and people growing up in poor neighborhoods without working families.
Therefore increases in productivity are by no means evenly spaced. You also have the problem that Sowell consistently points out that percentage of households is highly unrepresentative of actual individuals within the group.