Britain waking up to the ill-effects of minimum wage laws too

The minimum wage may be pricing young people out of work because employers are finding it too expensive to give them their first job, Government pay advisers have said.

Firms may be reluctant to create jobs by recruiting inexperienced staff because they are put off by the increased wage bill, the Low Pay Commission has suggested.

The Commission’s intervention comes amid calls from businesses for minsters to freeze or even cut the rate to enable more young people to find work.

Conservative ministers meeting at the party’s conference are to promise a raft of measures to boost the stalling UK economy. The claims will add to pressure on the Government to go further.

New rates for the minimum wage took effect on Saturday. For 18-20 year olds, the minimum wage is now £4.98, up from £4.92. For 16-17 year olds, the new rate is £3.68, up from £3.64.

Tim Butcher, the commission’s chief economist told the Daily Telegraph that the body is launching a new investigation into the role the minimum wage has played in Britain’s growing youth unemployment problem.

Official figures last month showed that almost 1 million of the 2.5 million people officially counted as unemployed in Britain are aged between 16 and 24.

Almost 220,000 have been out of work for more than a year and some economists fear a "lost generation" of young people who never learn the habits of work and face a lifelong struggle ever to find employment.

In its official advice to the Government on this year’s pay rates, the commission raised concerns about younger workers, the first such warning since the introduction of the legal minimum rate in 1999.

The commission’s move is will put he minimum wage on the agenda as ministers search for ways to help companies prosper.... The British Chambers of Commerce said that the minimum wage should be part of the effort to reinvigorate the economy.

Adam Marshall, Director of Policy at the BCC said that there should be a freeze in the minimum wage for younger workers, followed by a consultation with employers about a gradual reduction in the rate.

"The concern is that the current rate is discouraging some employees from taking on young people and giving them a chance to get into the workplace," he said. "Some companies are finding the rate is a real problem."

Under this year’s rates, workers over 21 must legally be paid at least £6.08 an hour, up from £5.93. That is a 2.5 per cent rise. By contrast, this year’s rise in youth rates is 1 per cent, reflecting the commission’s concerns about youth unemployment.

More HERE

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Bringing Selfish Back

Katie Kieffer

When politicians, journalists and college professors use words like “share,” “fair” and “redistribution,” they are trying to make socialist ideas sound sexy. Socialism isn’t sexy; it’s suffocating.

Here’s what’s sexy: “Selfishly” working hard to secure your own financial independence and making free choices with regard to your career, romantic relationships, children and estate. Let’s bring selfish back, y’all!

The problem with words like “share” and “fair”–words five-year-olds use when they want to play with their big brother or sister’s toys–is that they’re innocuous. They are inappropriate for describing government policies that ultimately replace freedom with thralldom.

Liberals will tell me things like: “Socialism is not communism. Socialism merely levels the playing field; it prevents rich people from creating monopolies and controlling everyone else.” My response is: “Have you read The Communist Manifesto lately?”

Marx believed that socialism was the natural first step toward its full realization, namely communism. When and if liberals actually read Manifesto, they’ll notice that Marx lays out ten steps that are “generally applicable” to establishing communist socialism. At least six of these steps look quite similar to current and pending U.S. polices.

1. “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax” (we have this now and it will become even more progressive if the Buffett Tax is implemented).

2. “Abolition of all right of inheritance” (think excessive and duplicative estate and inheritance taxes).

3. “Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly” (think Frank Dodd and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s monopoly on guaranteeing mortgages).

4. “Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state” (think net neutrality regulations and the TSA).

5. “Establishment of industrial armies” (think labor unions).

6. “Free education for all children in public schools” (yep).

All I’m saying is that America succeeds when she plays to her proven strength, namely capitalism. Just as a football coach adjusts his game plan when his quarterback is repeatedly sacked, America should change things up when she begins following significant parts of Marx’s playbook.

My problem with socialism is that it takes the fun out of life. Many college professors won’t admit that by “sharing” all your private property with the state, you’d surrender your ability to freely choose. And when you can’t prefer one thing, person or activity to another, life becomes drudgery.

As socialism progresses it eliminates career preference. The state decides what career you will pursue from an early age. You pursue a role the state deems best, not the career you discover and prefer.

Socialism also nixes romantic preference. Radical socialists like Marx teach that capitalism leads to prostitution. Marx says capitalists instituted marriage to keep their capital within their own family by procreating and carrying on their family line. He thinks socialism removes the “claptrap” of love by freeing every woman from allegiance to one man and her biological children.

Marx also expunges parental preference. Manifesto directs parents to hand their children over to the state to be raised. This prevents capitalists from passing their capital along to their children and keeping their wealth within their family instead of sharing it with the nation.

I think we should be free to prefer and raise our own children. We should also be free to pass on the fruits of our labor to our own flesh and blood. There is nothing wrong with exclusive love. There is nothing wrong with inheriting your parents’ money.

Ayn Rand was a teenager in Soviet Russia. She wrote a short novel, Anthem, where she envisions what could happen to man when society fully embraces collectivism: Preference of any kind becomes evil.

Her nameless hero, “Equality 7-2521” relays how the law “says that men may not think of women, save at the Time of Mating. This is the time each spring when all the men older than twenty and all the women older than eighteen are sent for one night to the City Palace of Mating. And each of the men have one of the women assigned to them by the Council of Eugenics. Children are born each winter, but women never see their children and children never know their parents.”

Equality 7-2521 struggles because he prefers one woman (the Golden One). She also prefers him. They feel suffocated because they are unable to express their exclusive love within the socialist society.

I’d rather choose my own career than have the state decide how I can best serve the common good. I’d prefer to bequeath my estate to my family and my favorite charities than to the government. I’d prefer to love one person than to owe sexual allegiance to every man in the nation.

Bottom line, I cherish property rights and freedom; I am selfish.

SOURCE

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The ACLU – A Change of Heart or Cowardice?

The ANC [American News Commentary] reported in its September 21, 2011 issue that the ACLU is defending the right of Muslims to exercise prayer in public schools in San Diego… Really?

Is that a change of heart or the expression of a cowardly and terrified heart? It is most likely the latter. Let me explain.

Over the last 40 years or so, the ACLU has terrified many school boards, school administrators, and school children by threatening to drag them into court if they pray in public.

A few years ago, they terrified many coaches and sporting event coordinators by warning them that if they dare pray in public, the ACLU would bring about the full weight of their false interpretation of the Establishment Clause.

For many years, they have sent their emissaries across the land, “Gestapo-like,” checking out every small city council, lest they open their meeting with prayer. But now they are coming out of their closets and are supporting Muslim students praying in public schools.

If you think that this defies every aspect of human logic, you would be right.

Fear is a powerful factor – fear devastates logical thinking, fear decimates consistency and their support for Islamic prayer in public schools in San Diego is a clear indication of that fear. They know all too well what will happen to them if they exercise their clever maneuvers on Muslims. They will not see the love and forgiveness they have received from Christians. Rather, they will see the end of the sword.

Surprise, surprise when Kevin Keenan, the spokesperson for the ACLU in San Diego, explained his enthusiastic support for Muslims praying in public schools, he said: “Performing these prayers is widely recognized as one of the five essential pillars of Islam.”

Really? Have they not heard, do they not know that Christians and Jews are also exhorted to pray?

Have they not heard, do they not know that for Christians, prayer is a life-line to their Savior, the God of the universe?

Have they not heard, do they not know that the prophet Daniel was thrown into the den of lions because he would not stop praying to the God of Heaven?

Have they not heard, do they not know that for Christians prayer is the foremost expression of their desire to commit themselves, their schools, their sporting events, and their public meetings to the Lord God Almighty?

Can one hope that appealing to the ACLU to be fair and just and not single out Christians, who are loving and forgiving, will make a difference? Meanwhile, they cower when it comes to Muslims, who may talk with the sword.

Can one appeal to them to see the light before it is too late for them as “infidels”—the first in line to face the sword under the Sharia?

Can one appeal to them to exercise even the most basic of human logic, let alone review history and truth? One can hope.

SOURCE

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Black caucus bad for blacks

Black America suffers disproportionately today because its leaders – uniformly liberal Democrats like our president – have been peddling failed big government policies for almost half a century.

Now, in the words of Barack Obama’s former pastor, “The chickens are coming home to roost.”

Dr King stood before the nation in August 1963, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, and said “America has given the Negro people a bad check, which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

It is time for today’s black Americans to deliver this same message to their left wing black leaders. The promise of secular liberalism, of the fantasy of big government redemption, which blacks have been sold since 1964, is a bad check which is coming back today marked “insufficient funds.”

Today’s tragedy is the refusal to learn. Because we do know what works and we do know what doesn’t work.

And black leadership has continued, year after year, to embrace and sell what doesn’t work and black Americans continue to buy it and return these same individuals to power.

What does work? Let every black American read Dr. Ben Carson’s book Gifted Hands. Let them read how his illiterate mother, working as a domestic, told her two little boys to turn off the TV and made them read two books a week.

Let them read how a young black man from the ghetto became head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University.

And let every black American read about Dr. Carson’s faith, which guides his life and how he raises his children.

Our president sends his two beautiful daughters to a fancy private school in Washington, DC. But why can’t every black mother send her son or daughter to whatever school she wants?

The black Caucus is not criticizing Barack Obama because his big government answers don’t work. They are criticizing him for not doing enough of it.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

CA: Gov. Brown signs bill that allows for bans on circumcision: "California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Sunday a bill that prevents local governments from banning the practice of male circumcision. The legislation comes in response to an effort this summer by a San Francisco Bay Area advocacy group opposed to the practice to get a measure proposing a citywide ban added to the November 8 city ballot."

Nothing good grows at the Department of Agriculture: "People who are not farmers, or who don’t know any farmers, probably know very little about the U.S. Department of Agriculture. What most of us do know about USDA, other than the stamp it places on meat packages, is that it takes billions of dollars from taxpayers to pay farmers not to grow things. Basically it’s a large federal bureaucracy that pays productive people not to be productive."

Free trade without apology: "With the economy sputtering and unemployment still high, President Obama is looking for ways to jump start growth. He recently stated his intention to gain Congressional approval for free trade agreements (FTAs) with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. The president’s new stated commitment to free trade is welcome, but there was no need for him to wait this long."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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