The Wages of Socialism

The other day I came across this article and found it very revealing with respect to what socialism does to an economy and a nation. The article describes how Germans are practically attending college in perpetuity these days; the average age of a German college student is 23, and some students stay well into their 30s. They're able to do this because Germany's socialist government provides free education - primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary. Students want to do this because Germany's job market is barren; it's easier to find a job as a student than as a degree holder. Why?

To hire a student, all you gotta do is pay him. But to hire a non-student, it's not enough to just pay him, oh no. The state requires that you also provide a pension, all kinds of insurance, and so forth. This is based on the socialist belief that corporations are run by sick evil freaks who hate their employees, and government has to step in or everyone will starve to death.

But you can't evade reality; the laws of the economy are non-negotiable. Every time you force a company to pay a pension that it otherwise wouldn't, every time you insist on some benefit that might not exist otherwise, you do so at the expense of someone else's job. It's the same thing with minimum wage; 90% of economists agree that it destroys jobs, because it forces employers to pay more for labor than it's worth, thus, they can afford less of it.

The funny thing is, part of Angela Merkel's plan to assuage Germany's unemployment problem is more of exactly what's caused it - statism. Specifically, pensions will be frozen, wage and price controls will be enforced, etc. Didn't we learn anything from Nixon? He imposed the same kind of controls, and we ended up with a recession. You couldn't get a job pushing a broom if you couldn't prove that you'd been doing it for ten years. Then Reagan reversed it with a return to a relatively free market, which brought the prosperity of the '80s. But that's a whole other story.