IanWelsh.net: Week-end Wrap—Political Economy—By the 1920s, the French had the most powerful military in Europe, and yet they crumbled under the Nazis not long afterward. The collapse of French democracy preceded the German invasion. “… the French upper classes openly opposed new Socialist Prime Minister Leon Blum with the slogan, ‘Better Hitler than Blum.’ The United States today appears on a similar course of decline.”

How many Americans would have shrugged off an enemy attack under Trump? How many would do the same under Biden? Hard-core MAGAs at times seem to view the Democratic Party as an enemy threat to the US, and Russia as an ally.

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Businesses that find it hard to hire need to raise their wages. Companies that do that have job applicants lined up out the door. That’s how free markets work.

Covid benefits may serve as a de facto increase to the minimum wage. I’m OK with that.

Benjamin Franklin: “….To desire to keep down the rate of wages… is to seek to render the citizens of a state miserable… “

Henry Ford: Paying good wages is good for business. “If we can distribute high wages, then that money is going to be spent and it will serve to make storekeepers and distributors and manufacturers and workers in other lines more prosperous and their prosperity will be reflected in our sales. Country-wide high wages spell country-wide prosperity, provided, however, the higher wages are paid for higher production…. “

Ford: “There is nothing to running a business by custom—to saying: ‘I pay the going rate of wages.’ The same man would not so easily say: ‘I have nothing better or cheaper to sell than any one has.’ No manufacturer in his right mind would contend that buying only the cheapest materials is the way to make certain of manufacturing the best article. Then why do we hear so much talk about the ‘liquidation of labour’ and the benefits that will flow to the country from cutting wages—which means only the cutting of buying power and the curtailing of the home market? What good is industry if it be so unskillfully managed as not to return a living to everyone concerned? No question is more important than that of wages—most of the people of the country live on wages. The scale of their living—the rate of their wages—determines the prosperity of the country.”