L. Neil Smith's
THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 11, August 1996

Letters to the Editors


Comments on the Disney article from Eric Oppen

         Hi, L. Neil. I've really been enjoying the Libertarian Enterprise, as I'm sure you're aware. I hope you've been keeping well.
         What prompted this is the fact that, a few days after I downloaded and printed out for later delectation the latest LE, I ran across a 'zine published by John Marr, out of San Francisco, called Murder Can Be Fun. The latest copy I have covers "Zoo Deaths", meaning mostly idiotic people getting into cages with the animals, and the animals doing what they really do in real life, not what idiotic Bambiists think they ought to do. (They call it tragedy, I call it Chlorine in the gene pool!)
         One article in particular should interest you. You mentioned a lot of reasons to be down on Disney, but one thing that you missed or didn't think of is the way that a lot of children, over the years, have gotten themselves hurt or killed because they wanted to get close to the animals in the zoo. After all, they had seen thousands of hours of cartoons in which these same animals were, at least, friendly, and the worst of them were pompous, stupid and very easily outwitted. He specifically mentions the Lion King video as a good reason to keep the vertically-challenged, knowledge-deficient, legume-anorexic chronologically-underprivileged away from the lion house, pointing out that all the lions in the movie are apparently portrayed as vegetarians, or possibly living off sunlight like so many plants.
         Personally, except for a few movies, I've always much preferred Warner Bros. over Disney...the sickey-sweet stuff Dizzy does just doesn't do it for me.


Praise and criticisms from Bart Croughs

Hello,

         I like your magazine. Having said this, now a bit of criticism.
         In his article 'Congress OKs new middle class pay cut; democrats cheer' in the Libertarian Enterprise number 9, Vin Suprinowicz offers his readers a bit of faulty economic reasoning. According to Suprinowicz, a higher minimum wage would not only lead to more unemployment but would also lead to inflation. His reasoning goes like this: most employers will find a way to pay the higher minimum wage, and pass it on to their customers in the form of higher prices. Other employees will demand higher wages to compensate for the higher prices, etcetera. In short, inflation!
         Where does this argument go wrong? Simple: employers will *not* find a way to pay the higher minimum wage and pass it on to their customers. If they could ask their customers higher prices without lowering their profits, their prices would already be higher! Prices are always set at the level that promises the highest profit.
         The only effect of a higher minimum wage is more unemployment. If a man produces the value of $4.25 per hour, and the minimum wage is $4.75 per hour, no employer who is in his right mind will offer this man a job. The employer who offers this man a job at $4.75 per hour and raises his prices to cover the extra costs, will not be able to compete with employers who are sane enough not to offer a $4.25 man a $4.75 job. That's the way the market works.
         The cause of inflation is completely different: it's the pouring of more and more fiat money into the economy by the banks, a process which is orchestrated by the Fed. The solution would be to return to the gold standard and to abolish fractional reserve banking.
         There's nothing new here. You can find it in all the great libertarian/austrian economists: Hazlitt, Rothbard, etc.


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