To Rev Ben Johnson and his blogpost claiming that higher minimum wages increases unemployment. This appeared in the Acton Blog.
As usual, this conservative approach to the problem lacks a broader perspective and awareness of the current system. For such would take an overview of the whole economic system let alone other factors, which are in the system, that would drive up unemployment when raising the minimum wage. We should note that when raising the minimum wage leads to an decrease in employment, only raising the minimum wage is criticized by Johnson. Growing wealth disparity, which, in part, results from not limiting the highest pay one group can make while limiting the minimum wage for another group, is not criticized despite the IMF view that wealth disparity can lower the limit and duration of economic growth (see https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/06/13/editorials/challenge-economic-orthodoxy/#.WllXX7XoSfY ). In addition, the widespread ethic of many businesses to maximize profits is not criticized which should be ironic since the writer of the above article has the title reverend.
Rev Johnson doesn't step outside the economic system in which we live to realize that it is offering low-skilled workers a choice between poverty wages and unemployment while many supporters of that system are demanding that such workers pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Also note that only America's economic system is being used as a frame of reference when examining the relationship between higher minimum wages and employment rates. So we might want to look at some European nations that have higher minimum wages to see how employments rates change. For if higher minimum wages do not cause the increased levels of unemployment in those nations as they do here, then we might realize that something needs to change in our economic system if not the system itself. And we should also note that paying employees poverty wages does help businesses maximize profits since those making such wages get help from government assistance programs that are supported by the same taxes that many businesses do their best to avoid paying. This is business's way of proving that it can have its cake and eat it too.
So we have an economic system that provides the draconian choice for low-skill workers along with a commonly adopted ethic of maximizing one's profits while only the American economic system is evaluated, and Rev. Johnson can only blame higher minimum wages for rising unemployment.
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Jan 13
To Christopher Degroot and his blogpost about the problems with having a lack of self-knowledge. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
There are some good points made here. That what we believe about ourselves falls more in line with what we want to believe than what is true is an excellent point. But that applies not just to individuals but to groups and even whole societies. Should that truth make us leery of saying that America was ever a 'a city on the hill'? Certainly many Native Americans would not see our nation that way..
And yes, government policies are not the silver bullets that kill the evil inside of us. But that doesn't mean that they can't many times protect others from the evil that is us. That was a point made by Martin Luther King Jr. And who can say that the long-term effect of protective laws does not tend to help people change or develop differently? For many who believe that what is legal is what is moral, can't structural changes partially affect what they think is moral?
There is an evil in all of us. And what is counter intuitive to us religiously conservative Christians is that sometimes, we are the ones who exhibit more evil than unbelievers. In fact, some unbelievers are or become very noble. And that means that unbelievers don't always need us to change. In fact, sometimes, quite the opposite is true.
Yes, we need structural and policy changes that curb the evils in us which hurt others. But we also need to promote what Martin Luther King called a 'person-oriented society' over against a 'thing-oriented society.' In the former, people are counted as being more important than gadgets, profits, and property rights. That should be the minimal moral standard for our society. And if we don't associate the preaching of the Gospel with that moral standard, then either we will misrepresent the Gospel or we will pre-emptively offend people so that they don't want to listen to the Gospel.
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Jan 16
To Rev. Ben Johnson and his blogpost about how King rejected Communism. This appeared in the Acton blog.
We should note that King criticized and eventually rejected Capitalism. His criticisms of Capitalism, which were not just to do the people he hung with and read, included its own kind of materialism, which King thought was just as destructive as Communism's materialism, Capitalism denied that life was social, which paralleled his criticism of Communism as forgetting that life is individual, and he rejected Capitalism because of how it distributed wealth. He actually favored a democratic socialism because, unlike many of the Left's opponents, he did not suffer from having binary vision when looking at history or the present. Binary vision causes people to see the other side as being a monolith full of evil.
Furthermore King called for us to workout a hybrid that included the best of both Communism and Capitalism. BTW, we should note that the form of Capitalism practiced during King's time is not the same form of Capitalism practiced today. What was practiced during King's time included far more government control of the economy than what is practiced in today's nations that embrace, to varying degrees, Neoliberalism. King would have been appalled that we had transitioned from Keynesian form of economics under the Bretton-Woods System to Neoliberalism.
We should also note a specific quote from King that was spoken during his speech against the Vietnam War and addresses the kind of morality embraced during his time and, even more so, today:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
We should note two things from this quote. That with Neoliberalism, society has become even more thing-oriented than it was when King was living. Second, the problems of racism, materialism, and militarism cannot be solved for as long as we are a thing-oriented society. That means that despite all of our talk about eliminating racism, we not only need good laws, we need to undergo that moral revolution King spoke about.
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