I came across this intriguing story out of Silicon Valley today:

SUNNYVALE (CBS SF) - Bloom Energy Corp. has been ordered by a U.S. District Court Judge to pay $31,922 in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages to employees from Mexico after the company was found to have willfully violated the minimum wage, overtime and record-keeping provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Bloom, a manufacturer of solid oxide fuel cells, has been paying 14 workers brought to the United States from Chihuahua, Mexico less than $3 per hour for refurbishing work performed at the company headquarters in Sunnyvale.

…..

According to a press release from the Labor Department, Bloom Energy brought the workers in from Mexico to refurbish power generators alongside U.S. workers. Federal investigators found that the workers were paid in Mexican pesos the equivalent of $2.66 per hour. The FLSA requires that covered, nonexempt employees be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for all hours worked. California minimum wage is $8 per hour.

First off, any corporation or company guilty of knowingly breaking the law deserves whatever due punishment is prescribed by statute. Secondly, it appears that “progressive” and “green” businesses are just as susceptible to exploiting cheap labor from Mexico as any “Right-wing”-owned or supported company. I point this out purely because the association of any and all exploits found under our current “capitalistic” (term used loosely) system are always blamed on proponents of freer economic markets (and limited government). This perceived endorsement of perfidious behavior in the marketplace isn’t a minor point either. It is the rationale employed by many Americans – especially younger ones – to denounce, if not out-right reject, any association with free market capitalism.

Third, the minimum wage laws in this country are, on the whole, rubbish. Their real-world effects run in direction contradiction to the stream of well-intentioned hot air cascading forth from whichever bleeding-heart politician or community organizer happens to be singing their praises in front of a camera crew at the moment.

I’m not saying that the specific scenario detailed in the news report above is a pitch-perfect example of what’s wrong with labor laws in the United States, and I’m certainly not defending the actions of Bloom Energy. What I am saying is simply that the panic button and red-flashing light certain journalists, reporters and politicians want going off in the hearts and minds of the average American adult any time they hear about how few dollars/pesos other human beings are willing to work for need to be reigned in a bit. We must take a deep breath and decide to soberly investigate if something like the Minimum Wage Law has worked, is working, or can ever work.

Dr. Thomas Sowell (Hoover Institution) has a few thoughts on the subject:
Read more on Green Energy Exploits and the Minimum Wage…

The Myth of the Zero Sum Game
Jay Richards, Institute for Faith, Work & Economics

Myth #3: The Zero Sum Game Myth – believing that trade requires a winner and a loser.

Read more on PowerLinks – 02.07.13…

As I noted last week, my review of Nicholas Eberstadt’s Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic appears in the current issue of The City, a fine publication produced by Houston Baptist University.

Read more on Beyond Makers and Takers: The Real Diversity of Society…

In Businessweek late last year, Jason Zinoman noted the Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross with Al Pacino as Levine. The play, says Zinoman, “speaks as directly to the economic anxieties of today as when it opened on Broadway in 1984, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s first term. Then, the play was widely seen by critics as a left-wing attack on a free-market system run amok.”

But as he also notes,

Glengarry Glen Ross is often compared to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, but the fundamental difference is that Mamet shows us in concrete detail the value of work. He lets the audience see salesmen doing their job, and then distinguishes between those who do it well and those who don’t. In fact, as corrupt as the office may be, there is a meritocratic ethos at its core—the most impressive salesman, Roma, is also the most successful. Levene, by contrast, repeats himself, caves in negotiation, lies poorly. It’s easy to have sympathy for him, but hard to conclude that he doesn’t deserve to get paid less than Roma. Look closely enough at this play and you’ll find a belief in the market as well as a critique of it. Like most great dramas or novels, its ideas are far too complicated to fit into a slogan.

As another great work of fiction that likewise doesn’t fit neatly into a simple binary pattern, in between Death of a Salesman (1949) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), I’d like to also highlight a short novel I recently read, Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956). Seize the Day follows the travails of hapless Tommy Wilhelm as he tries to scrape out a living in New York, or at least as he tries to appear to try to do so. There’s some serious engagement with the realities of internalized expectations, competition, envy, hucksterism, and the phenomena of commodity speculation.
Read more on Parenting under Poverty and Affluence…

James Q. Wilson’s terrific book Bureaucracy has an interesting story about Donald Trump and New York mayor Ed Koch. The year was 1986. The city of New York had spent six years and $13 million failing to build an ice skating rink in Central Park. In early summer that year, Donald Trump proposed to Mayor Ed Koch that he take over the project for $3 million and promised to cover any excess amounts himself rather than go back to the city. By late October the project was finished and was three quarters of a million dollars under budget.

Read more on Donald Trump, Ed Koch, and the Ice Skating Rink: A Tale of Bureaucracy…

Imagine that you have a series of plumbing problems in your house—clogged sinks, backed up toilets—and decide to hire a plumber. Which of these two incentive structures would you choose?

(A) The plumber only gets paid when the problems are fixed.
(B) The plumber will continue to be paid indefinitely for working on the problem, and will continue to get paid as long as the problem persists

Most of us would choose option A since we are more interested in functional indoor plumbing than we are in providing a paycheck for plumbers. Hard-working plumbers should prefer option A too since it respects their dignity and skills. The vocation of the plumber is to solve plumbing problems, not to latch onto make-work projects.

So if most people would choose option A, why does the government almost always adopt an incentive structure that reflects option B?
Read more on Why Government Workers Should Get Pay Decreases for Longevity…

Family, church, and school are the three basic people-forming institutions, says Pat Fagan, so it’s no wonder that they produce the best results—including economic and political ones—when they cooperate:

Besides marriage, the other foundational institution that fosters human flourishing is religion. The effects of religious worship are dramatically visible in U.S. national survey correlational studies and increasingly in causational studies in areas like education, crime reduction, and health. Religious practice and prayer are good for marriage, but when marriage and worship are combined in family life, children thrive even more, and a decade or two later the economy experiences the benefits when those children are more productive earners.

Read more on The Wealth of Nations Depends on the Health of Families…

5 Reasons You Should Celebrate Black History Month
Jemar Tisby, Reformed African American Network

While not everyone agrees Black History Month is a good thing, here are several reasons why I think it’s appropriate to celebrate this occasion.

Read more on PowerLinks – 02.06.13…

Ge Wang, adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at the Virginia Tech/Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, and seven of his colleagues published a study refuting early claims that affirmative actions should be taken to protect against racial discrimination when grants are dispersed.

The discussions about research grants and race escalated when a 2011 issue of Science magazine reported “that Asians were four percentage points and black or African American applicants 13 percentage points ‘less likely to receive NIH investigator-initiated research funding compared to whites.’”

Using a U.S News and World Report ranking on the top 92 medical schools, Wang and his team reportedly compiled data on black and white faculty members in departments of internal medicine, surgery, and basic sciences from a subset of 31 schools. The researchers found 130 black faculty members, and then randomly selected 40 of them for comparison. They paired the 40 black faculty with 80 white faculty peers including the same gender, degree, title, specialty, and university.
Read more on No Race Bias In The Sciences…

Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven explain why it’s essential to make the moral case for conservatism:

If there is a single reason why conservatives continue to lose the battle of ideas, it’s because we don’t make the moral case for freedom and free markets. Our political class instead makes the economic case for our philosophy. Our smart guys are so impressed with their own intelligence, they think we can win the debate using numbers and data, charts and graphs, and political tactics and strategy.

Read more on The Moral Case for Conservatism…