Setting Other People’s Wages

GUALFIN, Argentina – We are delighted with all the back talk we got from our Diary on the “Absurdity of the “Living Wage.” The responses were lively… and entertaining. We laughed. We cried. Many people thought that we had given priests too much money… and prostitutes not enough. We could go either way on that.

Still, we got no complaints from prostitutes, but many from doctors. They wrote in to tell us how hard they worked and how outraged they would be if they earned less than nurses. (Scroll down to today’s Mailbag for more.) They may not have noticed how far our tongue had reached into our cheek. But what fun it is setting other people’s wages!

We even got a letter from a former resident of Communist Yugoslavia who had participated on a government board charged with setting salaries for different job classifications. He was so disgusted by it he emigrated to the U.S.

Finally, one reader probably spoke for thousands: “This is the most idiotic article in the history of articles.” We are too modest to believe it. But if it is so, it is certainly an achievement!

After all, Larry Summers and Paul Krugman write articles too. So do doctors! It is hard to believe that we could top them all. But enough of this. We have to turn to other things… Such as the collapse of the whole world economy!

Eager to be replaced by automatons: assorted McDonalds personnel

Photo credit: Steve Rhodes / flickr

A New Global Recession

Yes, it seems to be coming. Our friend and longtime Bonner & Partners Family Office member Hense Ellis summarizes:

“A new global recession has begun. The collapse in commodity prices and the slump in the emerging market economies will inevitably lead to a sharp drop in global investment and a new surge in unemployment. Moreover, the recent stock market sell-off is making matters much worse by creating a negative wealth effect that will cause consumption to fall.”