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Showing posts from March, 2014

A Miracle. A small personal story.

Last week I lost my cell phone. Yep.   And it’s an IPhone 5.   And it was unlocked. What happened next was a miracle. But first let me set the scene.   My wife and I were returning from Rochester, a town that is a five hour drive from our home in Dover NJ.   And since we started the day in Dover, ours was a long day of driving. We were maybe 3 hours from home when we stopped at a rest stop on Interstate Highway 81, southbound at the NY/PA border.   I don’t usually carry my cell phone.   If I take a long drive, it is with my wife – she does all the driving, and carries her Blackberry.   I rarely carry my cell phone, except when I commute to work, and then my phone lives in my brief case, and is turned off.   But on this day my wife asked me to bring my cell phone.   I don’t know why, but she did.   So I put it in my coat pocket and we embarked.   From time to time over a long day, I would pull my phone out to look at my emails, or check out Facebook; then I would tu

There Is No Free Market For Labor

There is no free market for labor.   Before you start screaming at me that it is the free market for labor that has destroyed US wages, let me elaborate about just how different the market for labor is from what Adam Smith imagined in the 18 th century.   In the US, our labor market may be mostly free from government influence (other than that of fairly innocuous wages and hours laws) but the sellers and buyers are far from equal.   And it is the relative equality between seller and buyers that governs the exchanges between them.   Unfortunately, with labor, the laborers are selling themselves, and since industrialization, the power of large employers has dwarfed that of workers.   If you are a doctor or lawyer, or engineer or programmer (of the right kind of software) your special skill or monopoly license may give you a bit more power than the average worker, but for regular folks with average skills, you are a virtually a pawn.   And the situation gets worse the larger the