David Henderson on the Krugman, the Minimum Wage, and Sycophants

     Henderson says you should avoid Krugman commentators as they're mostly "sycophants." I read sycophant here as basically meaning "bottom feeders."

     "So how did Krugman handle the economics of the minimum wage? By talking about the politics of the minimum wage. Krugman tries to establish that the Republicans are shedding crocodile tears because they don't really care about the workers who might lose their jobs if the minimum wage were increased.

I wondered if any of his commenters on his web page would catch Krugman changing the subject. So I started reading through the comments, something I don't generally recommend because most of the commenters are sycophants,"

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/02/krugman_and_a_c.html

     If the 60s youth believed that you should never trust anyone over 30, today's establishment econ guys believe you should never trust anyone who hasn't read a college econ textbook. While Henderson dismisses "political not economic" arguments he clearly takes his own advice. I mean sycophants is several orders worse than Romney's 47 percenters. At a minimum, he doesn't worry about sounding condescending.

   I never get over how exercised these guys with their six figure salaries get over the idea that someone could be getting a $9 minimum wage. I just don't buy that their objections are totally economic either-I think there's a kind of moral sanctimoniousness: sorry you should have studied hard in school and done all the right things I did.

    Lars Christensen was impressed by Bob Murphy's YouTube video against the minimum wage. I'm either missing something or I have failed to read the right textbooks:

    "One of the unfortunate consequences of this crisis is increased political backing for “reforms” that have negative impact on aggregate supply. In the US in the 1930s it was the horrible National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and in today’s US it is higher minimum wages. I find it incredible that anybody seriously would question the negative supply side consequences of higher minimum wages. This is not a political issue, but a simple question of understanding the laws of supply and demand.

Anyway Bob Murphy explains it well in this Youtube video."

     http://marketmonetarist.com/2013/02/23/bob-murphy-on-minimum-wages-and-a-textbook-graph-to-illustrate-it/#comment-12127

     Murphy's main argument in this video is simply that if a $9 MW won't raise unemployment why not raise it to $100. Sure. Like if you say 2 aspirins will make you feel better then you are also arguing that 100 aspirins will make you feel 50 times better still.

     It seems that at best even the non-sycophantic establishment econ guys are at best split on the MW raising unemployment. So doesn't suggest that the effects are far from cataclysmic?