Edgar the Exploiter

About a year ago a video called George Ought to Help came out and introduced viewers to the concept of a voluntary society. It showed us that force is currently all around us and money is taken from individuals by the threat of taking away their freedoms. Government can only operate by force – they cannot operate through voluntary actions. It’s a great video to watch if you have not seen it.

After the success of that first video, the community crowd-sourced a second flick called Edgar the Exploiter where they tackle the issue of minimum wage. The problem with debating most people about minimum wage is that they only see the first level of actions. IE, “Why can you be against minimum wage because people need more money.” Well, similar how printing money doesn’t create wealth, raising wages to some arbitrary number doesn’t improve situations without having unexpected side effects.

This video points out how owners of businesses will react toward legislation which effects their business. Deeper than this, companies will try to get the government to pass legislation that helps them and hurts their competitors.

For example, when they started going TSA crazy and banning all sorts of liquids how do you think they came to 3.2 ounces. I’m sure there was a producer of products that already made products at that size, whereas their competitors did 3.5 ounces. Things like this happen all the time along the beltway.