Supply side Lamarkianism

Reply to : http://cafehayek.com/2012/09/quotation-of-the-day-411.html

Quotation of the Day…

by DON BOUDREAUX on SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

in COMPLEXITY & EMERGENCE, GROWTH, MYTHS AND FALLACIES

… is from page 263 of Deirdre McCloskey’s landmark 2010 volume, Bourgeois Dignity:

Workers in the United States and elsewhere grew radically better off from 1800 on, and 1900 on, and even from 1970 on because of the Bourgeois Deal, not because they went down and joined the union.  How do I know?  Answer: the nonunion people share nearly equally in the gain, even though they were paying as consumers for the fancier wages for union electricians in Michigan.  The maximum of 14 percent of “concessions” extracted by bargaining or strike doesn’t come close to accounting for the great magnitude of rise in the real wage.  There’s not enough profit – usually 10 or 15 percent of national income – to raise the level of the rest of national income by a factor of even two, that is 100 percent, much less the factor of eighteen it in fact rose after 1800.

As if the union wages didn't pull up the non-union wages. As if wages didn't accelerate with the strong union era's and fall off as they became week. If you're a non-union nurse you'll make more money in California  where unionized nurses pull up all nurses wages even more than enough to cover the increased cost of living in this beautiful state. The economy works by demand. Wage growth results in a viscous cycle of demand and further wage growth and awful awful shared prosperity. Instead of a few billionaires there become lots of millionaires. The supply side economic fraud has been exposed and it's economic practitioners will be castigated to the economic-lamarkian equivalent dust bin of society and their profession. Complete profession careers of fraud.  It survives as propaganda only through sheer power of the monied interest and all their vassals, courts, jesters and knights who pay homage and profit themselves from it