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Because I’m sure he’ll appreciate whatever minimal traffic I can send him, I’ll comment on a blog post by Abdul suggesting that we use the free market to raise the minimum wage. In particular, he suggests that, if as a matter of policy, our individual preference is to see workers paid better, we should direct our business to those organizations that pay their employees well.

This is a fine idea, but not sufficient to address what amounts to a structural imbalance. Commercial efforts generate a certain amount of additional value. That additional value, the profit, gets split up among the people who produced the value — investors, management, and labor usually. The way the profit gets divided up is not necessarily in proportion to the value of the contributions of each party. Rather, it has to do with the bargaining power of the respective contributors as well.

The problem labor has in getting its share of the profit pie tends to be lack of organization and lack of leverage. An individual laborer lacks bargaining power because an individual laborer is usually easily replaceable. In addition, the individual laborer often has to have whatever he or she can get as a matter of necessity — to acquire or maintain food, shelter, and clothing. That necessity has a coercive effect on their bargaining position. It’s not quite a gun to the head, but it makes it much more difficult for the laborer to walk away from the table than it is for management or the investor who is much more likely to have his or her necessities squared away.

So, I think the minimum wage debate ends up being a decision. The policy decision is that, by fiat, we require a certain minimum to ensure that labor gets at least a certain baseline portion of the profit. The alternative, I suppose, would be to go a more socialist direction where more of life’s necessities were guaranteed whether a person worked or not. At that point, the negotiation between labor, management, and investors would be more of an arm’s length transaction and the price point of the wages would more accurately reflect the value of the labor.

I’m not necessarily advocating the more socialist approach. Culturally, we have a deep opposition to policies that condone idleness — our Puritan work ethic perhaps. But, I think that’s the policy alternative to the minimum wage if we want the free market to receive accurate signals about proper labor prices.

In a Facebook discussion, Abdul suggested that the Tea Party was at war with the Libertarians, blaming them the Libertarians for Electoral defeat. Some in the discussion suggested that the Tea Party had forgotten its libertarian roots.

I’m not sure how libertarian the Tea Party ever was. The problem was, even from the beginning, with taking money from “us” and giving it to “them.” Remember Santelli’s Rant?

Why don’t you put up a web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we like to, at least, buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people who might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water, instead of drink(ing) the water.

In his case, it was the winners versus “the losers.” “Us versus Them” was always, in my mind, the motivating force of the Tea Party. Government regulations that sent money to “Us” was o.k. (That’s why, for example, Medicare always needed defending instead of defunding.) Now, defining the “Us” and defining the “Them” can be an interesting debate, but almost never a pretty one.

I saw two posts from conservative sources — though conservative in different ways — that struck me as related but contradictory. Both have to do with people having sex when they probably shouldn’t and how (or whether) to mitigate the consequences.

One was entitled “Rick Perry’s Catholic Problem” (h/t Tipsy). The other was by Abdul about Father’s Day and contraception.

Rick Perry is the governor of Texas who may well run for the Republican Presidential nomination. Gardisil is a vaccine that helps prevent the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) which causes genital warts and cervical cancer. Perry got into trouble because of his connections to the pharmaceutical companies, an executive law mandating that 11 and 12 year old girls get the vaccine, and a sense from some conservative quarters that the vaccine encourages promiscuity.

Per Tom Bevan:

[I]n Texas, Gov. Perry chose to bypass the legislature and on Feb. 2, 2007, he issued an executive order making Texas the first state in the country requiring all sixth-grade girls to receive the three-shot vaccination series (which cost about $120 per shot). The move generated a fierce public debate. Conservatives slammed Perry for promoting what they saw as an intrusion by the state into private health decisions of parents and their children. Some also complained that the mandate would encourage promiscuity among teenagers.

Per Joshua Mercer in the “Catholic Problem” article linked above:

So why would Culture of Life Catholics and evangelicals have a problem with this?

Unlike other public health threats like meningitis, which spreads easily between people in close quarters, the only way a teenager will get HPV is from sexual intercourse. If they abstain, they are in no real danger in getting this virus which causes cervical cancer.

Obviously Merck wants to make a lot of money by making all of our daughters get the $120 shots. And I understand that sexually transmitted diseases have become a pandemic, one that we don’t talk enough about.

But if we force every daughter to get Gardasil, we have lost hope in the ability of our children to say no to hazardous premarital sex.

(emphasis in the original.)

So, rather than lose some moral authority and risk clouding an unambiguous command not to have sex, the solution is to apparently forego a vaccine that would prevent your daughter from getting cervical cancer. (Leaving aside, for a moment, issues related to non-consensual sex.)

Contrast this with Abdul’s message on father’s day:

[W]hile a lot of the punditocracy spent Sunday pontificating on the importance of fathers, I honestly think we would have fewer societal issues if fewer people became fathers in the first place.

Allow me to elaborate. This past week a 16-year old was arrested for shooting and robbing a man on the Monon Trail. In less than four weeks a lot of good-hearted people are going to team up with law enforcement and patrol downtown Indianapolis during the second Saturday of Indiana Black Expo because some people are going to let their children run loose. For the past several weeks we’ve had hearings on the possible state takeover of failing schools because, in part, some people have decided not to be good parents and let their children’s’ education go straight to hell.

When I look at those few examples, it makes me wonder why instead of defunding Planned Parenthood, Indiana lawmakers didn’t increase funding and hand out gift cards. Let’s face it, some people are not just ready to be parents. And instead of chastising them, we really should turn our efforts into convincing them not to procreate. It’s not fair to the children and certainly not fair to us who will have to bear the costs, financial and otherwise, of their bad choices.

As a secular humanist type, my choice on these perspectives is pretty easy. I give my daughter the vaccine and protect her against cancer. (The concerns about Perry’s exercise of executive power, ties to the pharmaceutical company, and questions about efficacy are noted – but not the point of my post here.)

I agree with Abdul that there are a lot of people who don’t have the resources, commitment, or temperament for parenting; and the rest of us would be better off if they just went ahead and didn’t procreate until they matured. (It’s an open question as to whether the people who are more irresponsible about parenting would be terribly reliable in using contraception even if promoted and freely available.) I have more global concerns about the number of humans that are sustainable on planet earth. The procreation values of a bronze age tribe trying to survive and out compete neighbors might not be the sort of thing we need on a planet closing in on 7 billion humans.

In any case, the distinction between Abdul’s post and the Catholic Vote post makes me think, once again, of that book from some years ago positing that Red State culture figures having families turns adolescents into adults and Blue State culture figures only adults should create families.

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, rebels from the southern states took up arms against our country, firing on the American soldiers defending Fort Sumter. Residents of nearby Charleston sat on balconies and saluted this act of treason with cocktails.

Despite long years of tap dancing and arm waving after the fact, it’s clear that these southerners took up arms against their country in defense of slavery. They were mad that their preferred candidates had lost an election to Abraham Lincoln and decided to try to overturn the results of that election by force of arms because they were afraid of its impact on their ability to own people and steal their labor.

The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial at the time (h/t Abdul) that read, in part:

By the act of a handful of ingrates and traitors, war is inaugurated in this heretofore happy and peaceful Republic! While we write, the bombardment of Sumter is going on; and the blood of the few gallant defenders of the glorious old flag which yet, we hope, floats over that fortress is being poured out for their fidelity to the Constitution as it is, and the Union as our fathers made it!

The people know the cause of the fratricidal strife. The party, which, in the interests of a barbarous institution, has governed the country for the last 40 years, was beaten in the November election. The verdict of the people which does not touch a single one of the rights of any man, guarantied by the fundamental law, forbids the extension of that barbarous institution into national territory as yet uncursed by its blighting presence. This is the cause of the rebellion which months of effort has ripened into the bloody strife this day commenced! This and nothing else — this determination of a meagre minority to rule a powerful majority — this deification of Human Slavery as the guiding principle and polar star of a free people — are the dragon’s teeth which, sown in a pestilent soil, have produced armed men.

Despite modern protestation out of the South that the Civil War was about something, anything, other than slavery; the southerners of the time were quite clear about their reasons. The articles of secession are candid about the desire to preserve slavery and the feeling that the Northern States were insufficiently vigorous in their enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. (States Rights were not, it appears, so sacred when it was time to enforce that law.)

My purpose is not to berate the actions of people who lived 150 years ago. History is crowded to bursting with barbarity. And, for that matter, I’m sure our time will have plenty to answer for when future generations take a look back. But modern day Lost Cause apologists drive me crazy. It seems to me that our country is still wounded by slavery and the Civil War. And, while that wound is gradually scabbing over, it is still festering. I don’t think the wound can really heal until everyone in the country, including the south, recognizes: 1) that slavery was evil; 2) that the Civil War was prompted by a defense of that evil; 3) that the South was beaten; and 4) that it was a good thing the South lost because its reasons for taking up arms against the country were immoral.

Once those lessons have been internalized, I’ll happily concede that a lot of the people fighting for the South were probably decent people who thought they were doing the right thing. Until then, honoring the symbols of their cause and pretending that what they were doing was somehow noble is simply repugnant.

Last night – and this actually happened, it’s not just a story I’m making up to dramatize a point – I was drinking some water out of the tap, and it occurred to me what a remarkable thing this really is. There it was, immediate and clean. And, I thought to myself, “people who believe they don’t have any use for government really aren’t thinking it through.” I had a similar thought earlier in the day when NPR had a story about the current government in Somalia. I thought sarcastically, “now there’s a place with limited government.”

I’ve made similar comments here in the past but wasn’t going to belabor the point. The inevitable response from self-described champions of limited government is that, of course they’d keep the useful bits. But, then, this morning, I read a (probably offhand) facebook status from Abdul:

Is is my imagination or do the only people who don’t understand the government is broke tend to be people who [work?] for the government?

There it is, just an unblinking, unqualified assertion that “the government is broke.” I’m picking on Abdul here because he’s close to hand (and likes it), but I see this kind of thing all the time. Not some nuanced assertion about some aspect of government that the person doesn’t like, but a blanket assertion that “government is bad.” But, consider how the government assists you with water – from clean water laws, to either running the water company or at least giving it the tools it needs to acquire rights of way and keep the system running, to a fairly elaborate system for drainage that takes the water away pretty effectively when the snows melt or the heavy rains come.

The best parts of government are the parts we notice the least – the parts that work in the background and are taken for granted. Since the “government is bad” rhetoric tends toward the simplistic, we probably need to pipe up from time to time to acknowledge that there are aspects of government that are hugely beneficial.