Americans do not enjoy high wages. They enjoy artificially high wages, which they pay for with higher costs, and lost jobs.

I'll give you an example. When I was a kid, when you bought groceries at a grocery store, you didn't have to sack your own groceries, and you didn't have to push that cart full of groceries to your car. An employee of the store did that for you, and he even placed the groceries in your truck or the trunk of the car for you. (Driving it home, and getting the groceries into your house was, sadly, your responsibility.)

What happened to those guys and girls who did that for you? Well, minimum wage laws took those jobs away. And, not coincidentally, our standard of living began to fall.

Here's a question for you. If minimum wage laws are so good, why stop at a measly ten bucks an hour? Why not make it twenty bucks? Heck, lets make it a hundred bucks an hour, then we'll all be rich!

You can't legislate wealth. If you're a politician you can make yourself rich, and your cronies rich, but you can't create wealth by legislation or decree. Only a free market can do that.

What would happen in the U.S. if we went to a free market? I don't know, because a free market is smarter than any of us. But I suspect that some folks would indeed get a pay cut. (There isn't a hamburger flipper in the world worth $15 an hour.) Businesses would hire more people. Businesses would stop going overseas, and some of them would even start coming back. Entrepreneurs could once again afford to take risks and innovate. Those businesses that did move overseas will face new competition from younger, hungrier businesses forming in the U.S.

And a period of unheard-of prosperity would begin. Because only a free market, and a free people, can create wealth.

Onward and upward,
airforce