milagre mínimo garantido

"The State Against Economic Law: the Case of Minimum Wage Legislation" de George Reisman, sobre o milagre mínimo garantido:

When it comes to matters such as the theory of evolution and stem-cell research, so-called liberals—i.e., socialists who have stolen the name that once meant an advocate of individual freedom—ridicule religious conservatives for their desire to replace science with the dictates of an alleged divine power. Yet when it comes to matters of economic theory and economic policy—for example, minimum-wage legislation—these same liberals themselves invoke the dictates of an alleged divine power. Their divine power, of course, is not the God of traditional religion, but rather a historically much more recent deity: namely, the great god State.

Traditional religionists believe that an omnipotent God came before all natural law and was not bound or limited by any such law, but rather created such natural laws as suited him, as he went along. Just so, today’s liberals believe, at least in the realm of economics, that the State is not bound or limited by any pre-existing natural laws. In the case in hand, the State, today’s liberals believe, is free to decree wage rates above the level that would exist without its interference and no ill-effects, such as unemployment, will arise.

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Thus even if, however unlikely, the imposition of a minimum wage began in conditions in which it did not directly and immediately create any unemployment whatever, because of the shifting of funds from elsewhere to pay it, it would end up creating unemployment among the least skilled members of the economic system.

What is present in this analysis is merely an application of Henry Hazlitt’s one-sentence summary of his great classic Economics In One Lesson: Namely, that “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”