Correcting the Free Market

THE FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT of 1938 was the first minimum wage law enacted by the government in the United States. Economists will tell you that even without government intervention, a minimum wage tends to establish itself, through market forces. Economists will tell you a lot of stuff. And market forces? Well, depending on what "arket forces" happen to be unleashed and in play, people, jobs, and productivity have all kinds of interesting differences in value. For instance, if you play for the Yankees, and hit three hundred, with forty homers and over a hundred runs batted in, you're gonna make about twenty million a year for several years, and you will be worth every penny of it, from the viewpoint of the person paying your salary. But try teaching first grade, and see how long it takes to make twenty million dollars. The free market is a reflection of what people freely buy and sell, and directly reflects the relative importance, value, of those things being bought and sold. So, in America, baseball is considerably more important than first grade. And don't try to tell me that in a true free market, with private shcols instead of publc socialistic schools, the value of teachers would surpass that of ball players. In America, Entertainment is way more important than education. So much for the free market. Are we sure we really want to trust and rely on the free market to make our decisions for us, every time? Do we really want to eliminate government minimum wage, and watch fast food restaurants all across America's frutied plain start to pay desperate jobless people five dollars an hour? Or, do we want to maybe use reason to correct the abuses in free market economics brought about by insane cultural values? Because one thing for damned sure; we sure aint gonna correct our insane cultural values.