Benjamin asked me to read to him from my book. I told him I didn’t think he’d like it. He asked me to please try anyway.

Rage:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon —
The Greek warlord — and godlike Achilles.

Which of the immortals set these two
At each other’s throats?
Apollo,
Zeus’ son and Leto’s, offended
By the warlord. Agamemnon had dishonored
Chryses, Apollo’s priest, so the god
Struck the Greek camp with plague,
And the soldiers were dying of it.
Chryses
Had come to the Greek beachhead camp
Hauling a fortune for his daughter’s ransom.
Displaying Apollo’s sacral ribbons
On a golden staff, he made a formal plea
To the entire Greek army, but especially
The commanders, Atreus’ two sons:

"Sons of Atreus and Greek heroes all:
May the gods on Olympus grant you plunder
Of Priam’s city and a safe return home.
But give me my daughter back and accept
This ransom out of respect for Zeus’ son,
Lord Apollo, who deals death from afar."

A murmur rippled through the ranks:
"Respect the priest and take the ransom."
But Agamemnon was not pleased
And dismissed Chryses with a rough speech:

"Don’t let me ever catch you, old man, by these ships again,
Skulking around now or sneaking back later.
The god’s staff and ribbons won’t save you next time.
The girl is mine, and she’ll be an old woman in Argos
Before I let her go, working the loom in my house
And coming to my bed, far from her homeland.
Now clear out of here before you make me angry!"

The old man was afraid and did as he was told.
He walked in silence along the whispering surf line,
And when he had gone some distance the priest
Prayed to Lord Apollo, son of silken-haired Leto:

"Hear me, Silverbow, Protector of Chryses,
Lord of Holy Cilla, Master of Tenedos,
And Sminthian God of Plague!
If ever I’ve built a temple that pleased you
Or burnt fat thighbones of bulls and goats —
Grant me this prayer:
Let the Danaans pay for my tears with your arrows!"

Benjamin: Is the old man going where he’s not supposed to?

Me: No, he’s not going near Agamemnon’s ships. He’s going away from the ships. But he’s about to do something that will get his daughter back.

Benjamin: Why the man took his daughter?

Me: Um. Well. You see, in ancient times, when grownups would fight, they would fight much worse than kids fight. And sometimes they would take people prisoner, and take them home with them as slaves — to make them work for them in their homes. Do you understand?

Benjamin: No, papa.

Me: OK, well it’s very much like in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, where the Wicked Witch of the West destroys (or seems to destroy) the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, but takes Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion back to her castle, and makes Dorothy clean the castle kitchen for her.

Benjamin: So does the old man throw a bucket of water on him?

Me: Yes. Sort of. Only instead of water, he hits Agamemnon with plague…

What we said then: This isn’t a free market; it’s monetary central planning; it will all end badly. Study price theory!

What they said then: You’re wrong; you’re wrong; you’re wrong, you crazy extremist doomsayers. All other economists disagree with you.

What we say now: That wasn’t a free market, and that’s why it all ended badly. Stop interfering. Study price theory!

What they say now: No one saw this coming. Economists haven’t a clue. The free market has failed us. We need bigger government!

Another passage from Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook:

Before most parents realize it, a growing child is ready, in his own mind at least, to go out and challenge the world. In the last two thousand years, nothing has helped this exploratory need as much as the fairy tale.

I know what you may be thinking. “Fairy tales? Is he kidding? Why, those things are positively frightening. Children see enough violence on television — they don’t need kids pushing witches into ovens and evil spells and poisoned apples.”

Stop for a minute and remind yourself how long the fairy tale has been with us — in every nation and in every civilization. Surely there must be something significant here, an insight so important as to transcend time and mountains and cultures to arrive in the twenty-first century still intact. There are, for example, more than seven hundred different versions of Cinderella from hundreds of cultures. Nevertheless, they all tell the same story — a truly universal story. …

What distinguishes the fairy tale is that it speaks to the very heart and soul of the child. It admits to the child what so many parents and teachers spend hours trying to cover up or avoid. The fairy tale confirms what the child has been thinking all along — that it is a cold, cruel world out there and it’s waiting to eat him alive.

Now, if that were all the fairy tale said, it would have died out long ago. But it goes one step further. It addresses itself to the child’s sense of courage and adventure. The tale advises the child: Take your courage in hand and go out to meet the world head on. According to Bruno Bettelheim, the fairy tale offers this promise: If you have courage and if you persist, you can overcome any obstacle, conquer any foe.

By recognizing a child’s daily fears, appealing to his courage and confidence, and by offering hope, the fairy tale presents the child with a means by which he can understand the world and himself. And those who would deodorize the tales impose a fearsome lie upon the child. J.R.R. Tolkien cautioned, “It does not pay to leave a dragon out of your calculations if you live near him.” Judging from the daily averages, our land is filled with dragons:

[a bunch of horrifying statistics]

To send a child into that world unprepared is a crime.

Similar to the temptation to avoid fairy tales is the tendency of some adults to choose books that will keep the child forever young, books without problems, conflict, or drama. And then all too soon these same parents are asking why their children have lost interest in books. Of all the things we ask our books to be, few are as important as “believable.” Fiction, nonfiction, biographies, fantasies — the good ones work because they are believable. A world that is “forever pink,” … doesn’t work because children eventually realize its fakery.

From Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook:

Although some educators had been complaining about writing scores for decades, it was the mushroom cloud of business e-mail at the end of the 1990s that sparked the greatest change. Almost overnight, corporate America switched from telecommunication to written communication and, in the process, discovered how many CEOs, CFOs, and mid-level executives couldn’t string ten words together in a coherent sentence. Corporations were suddenly spending almost $3 billion a year to teach college-educated employees how to write, but the crisis was so deep it was often a case of “the blind leading the blind,” like this request to an online writing consultant:

i need help i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you.[34]

---

[34] Sam Dillon, “What Corporate America Cannot Build: A Sentence,” New York Times, December 7, 2004, p. A23.

I’m going to reproduce Jim Fedako’s post in its entirety:

My parents recently visited and left some relics of my youth. One look at this drawing sent my mind back in time.

Almost 40 years ago, it wasn’t enough for government to tell me about the evils of smoking, they also coerced me into sharing private family information — that my father smoked — in order to serve the agenda of the state.

Mind you, my father knew the dangers of smoking. Everyone did (and does). Nevertheless, after a hard day of work, my father had to face me — his smirking, deputized son — and my silly artwork and misspelled message.

At some time in our past, the state succeeded in elevating its education above all other institutions — the family included. By doing so, the state created the situation where it alone could indoctrinate the youth, and parents wouldn’t even raise a concern.

Yesterday it was smoking. Today it’s the environment. Tomorrow, who knows.

Whoever controls the minds of the youth controls the future.

I try so hard to ignore the news. I really don’t want to know what’s going on. But Mises.org is there to give me a gentle nudge every once in a while, as it did today. I learn from Art Carden’s new blog post that the minimum-wage floor is being raised tomorrow. Here we are in a depression and policy is being passed to put the most desperate people out of work. Here we are putting the poorest working people out of work and people who think of themselves as champions of marginal workers are cheering.

It’s clearly time to run this old effort of mine, however little it will do. Better to light a candle, etc. (he said as he cursed the darkness).

The 3 E’s of the Minimum Wage

It’s time, once again, to talk about the minimum wage.

Or rather, it’s time to talk about why we’re still talking about it.

Why is this absurd law still with us? Why is it so popular? Why are the Democrats talking about the need to raise the minimum yet again?

From an ethical perspective, the law is wrong. From an economic perspective, it is damaging and dangerous. And yet the emotional perspective — the actual basis of most opinions — has a strangle hold on well-intentioned people.

Let me elaborate the three E’s mentioned above:

E1: Ethical alignment.

This is also known as one’s principled or moral position. This is where we talk about right and wrong in our deepest sense of those words. This is the focus of those who believe that the ends cannot justify the means.

E2: Economic alignment.

This is also known as the practical, utilitarian, or consequentialist perspective. Those who believe that the ends can justify the means would presumably care most about economics, the study of which means effect what ends.

E3: Emotional alignment.

This is the realm of connotation, of symbolic alignment, which “side” you want to be on. Emotional alignment is how people feel about an issue, and perhaps more important, how they feel about the people they associate with the different sides.

To take a position, I believe one needs to address the first two: the ethical and the economic. To persuade someone, I think one needs to address all three. We libertarians often neglect E3. While most people will claim to hold positions based on morality or on consequences, they really base their positions on symbolic- or emotional alignment: agreeing with “the good guys” and not wanting to side with “those people” etc.

E1: The Ethics of the Minimum Wage

When debating the minimum wage law with an advocate, I used to address only E1: the right of contract. I didn’t need to understand the economics of price fixing and the consequences for unskilled labor; all that mattered was the right of individuals to engage in voluntary arrangements without the coercive influence of third parties.

If I own myself, then I own my labor. If I own my labor, then I have a right to exchange it for whatever compensation I agree to, on whatever terms I agree to. That’s my perspective as a worker. My perspective as an employer would be the same: if someone is willing to do work for me at a price I find agreeable, then it’s nobody else’s business to interfere with our exchange. This seems so straight-forward to me now that it takes a real effort to remember how I could ever have believed anything else.

E2: The Economics of the Minimum Wage

As Jim Cox points out in his Concise Guide to the Minimum Wage, the question isn’t whether a person will be employed at an hourly wage of $X or something more than $X; the question is whether the person will be employed at $X or unemployed at $0.

In the past, when talking with a minimum wage advocate who didn’t know any economics, I’d try to sketch out a very quick lesson on how to produce shortages and gluts through price fixing. I eventually realized that I was abstracting too much to hold their attention. (See E3, below.) It has proven more useful to describe concrete examples.

When I was growing up in New York, buildings all over the Upper West Side had doormen. They would welcome tenants and visitors in the lobby, and operate a manually controlled elevator to take them to their floor. At some point in the late 1970s, the doormen went on strike. I learned three things from this strike:
(1) It’s fun to operate an old-fashioned elevator when you’re a kid;
(2) To give the doormen what they were asking would have meant that my family’s rent would have to go up;
(3) It’s cheaper to install intercom systems and new push-button elevators than it is to pay the doormen more.

Everyone seems to understand why there are hardly any manually operated elevators left on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but they don’t seem to generalize that understanding to labor and the minimum wage.

Similarly, there are many on the economic Left who advocate excise taxes on cigarettes because they know that higher prices will discourage consumption of cigarettes. They want higher gas taxes to lower the consumption of gasoline. So why is it so hard to see that higher work prices will discourage the consumption of labor?

Many people I talk to about the minimum wage seem unaware of any economic downside. The mark of economic illiteracy is the failure to anticipate trade-offs. But some minimum wage advocates do understand the economics of price fixing and do acknowledge that a rising minimum wage means an increase in unemployment. So why do they still support the law? They point to labor statistics, which show that the unemployment effect is mostly on teenagers. They claim that it is worth a rise in the wages of “bread winners” if the only downside is the loss of some part-time and summer jobs for kids. They tend not to mention that these unemployed “kids” are mostly young black men, and that they are the least skilled and least educated among young black men. These are the people most in need of on-the-job training! Minimum wage advocates, mostly white so-called liberals, take for granted the very skills that these young men are now unable to learn on the job: punctuality, responsibility, communication, cooperation, etc. Next time you hear someone decrying the plight of inner city youth, ask how different their futures would be if the bottom rungs hadn’t been removed from the economic ladder.

E3: The Emotional Support of Minimum Wage Law

The most painful part in writing this is that nothing I’m saying is new.

So why is this battle still being fought? Worse yet: why does it seem that we’re losing? Minimum wage is one of the absolute simplest issues to address rationally, and yet the irrational law enjoys overwhelmingly popular support.

Abstract arguments and ethical principles leave people cold. They say that they are “results oriented” — which would seem to imply a belief in the positive economic consequences of price fixing. But when confronted with basic economic theory and history, they remain unconvinced.

Why?

Because to them, minimum wage law feels right. They don’t like thinking of someone working for less than $X per hour. To them, it therefore follows that no one should be allowed to hire a person for less than $X per hour. They don’t see it as a prohibition on labor; they see it as a blow against the oppressive bosses!

They associate the libertarian position not with principle or conviction, but with cold hearts, greed, and selfishness. What we call freedom of contract, they call exploitation. What we call reason, they are convinced is merely rationalization.

This is emotional alignment. Symbolic self-image. People who seem to care about the poor tend to support minimum wage law; therefore someone who wants to support the poor supports the position of that group. It’s as if reality itself could be defined by majority rules.

“I am a progressive, therefore I support progressive legislation.” Or, “The Christian position is X, and I’m a Christian, therefore I support X.”

It’s all based in the belief (habit, reflex) that an issue isn’t about a principle, isn’t about reason, but is always about whose side you’re on. There’s management and there’s labor. The rich and the poor. Exploiters and exploited. Minimum wage law is seen as siding with labor, siding with the poor, the underdog. To oppose minimum wage law is to side with management, to support the rich over the poor.

And of course, the whole context is the damned Class Warfare assumption that Marx managed to plant in the brains of even the most ardent anti-communists. An appreciation of market economics reveals the mutually beneficial nature of trade (as would simple philosophical rigor), but our culture has been indoctrinated with the image of economics-as-warfare. People believe that the rich take wealth from the rest of us, rather than creating wealth for the rest of us. To side with the rich in our dichotomous symbology would be to side with the thief over the victim, and no amount of principled argument — or even practical disproof — will shake that impression out of someone’s head when it’s been lodged in there for so long.

What is to be done?

Should libertarians abandon principles and persuasion in favor of symbolism and emotional manipulation? Perhaps we should focus more on public relations and advertising than on philosophy and economics.

No, there’s nothing wrong with E1 or E2. They are the realms of reason. Abandoning our heads for our hearts leaves us with only arbitrary next steps. But persuasion requires more than reason. It might be less about teaching and more about helping people unlearn certain mental reflexes.

From now on, if I’m going to discuss minimum wage law (or any other regulation, prohibition, or legislation) with a supporter, I’ll say up front that I’m going to address three different perspectives on the same issue, and I’ll introduce them to the 3E approach. There’s not much I can do to change someone’s symbolic alignment or their emotional reflexes, but by making these things an explicit part of the conversation, I can hope to reduce the hold they have on a person’s moral imagination.

“[In] Lincoln, Rhode Island … they cancelled the district spelling bee because only one child would win, leaving all the others behind, thus violating the intent of No Child Left Behind — or, as they might say in Lincoln, no child gets ahead.”

(Jim Trelease, The Read-Aloud Handbook, citing “P.C. Watch,” New York Times, Education, April 24, 2005, p. 7)

Reminds me of The Incredibles:

Dash: “Dad says our powers make us special!”

Mom: “Everyone’s special, Dash.”

Dash, muttering: “Which is another way of saying that nobody is.”

On the Mises Blog, William Anderson has an interesting review of Krugman’s latest (and more insidious than usual) apology for economic fascism, but what really caught my attention was this comment from “Adam I.”:

You know what I’ve realized about these guys? It’s true for pretty much all American foreign policy thinkers too.

History begins in 1930. There are five historical events:

• The Crash of ‘29 and the Great Depression
• The Rise of Hitler
• WWII
• The Cold War
• 9/11

That’s it. That’s history. Economists seem to stop paying attention in the 1950s anyway, so their list is even shorter.

The occasional random input is good. Without Hulu, I doubt I would ever have seen young Mr. Latz’s performance on “America’s Got Talent”:

Three-and-a-half years ago, I read Peter & Wendy (aka Peter Pan) to my wife’s pregnant belly, a chapter a night. The idea at the time was to get Benjamin used to his father’s voice before he was born.

We read several other books this way during the pregnancy, including both of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and several of Frank Baum’s Oz books, but it was Peter & Wendy that affected me most. It is not a comfortable book. It is not quite for children and not quite for grownups. The plays, musicals, cartoons, and films manage to leave out most of what’s disturbing about the book, but in doing so, they rip out its heart.

Those nightly readings ended when the boy was born, and I have missed them terribly. For three years now I’ve been waiting to resume chapter-a-night family book time, and it’s finally happened. We began with Alice in Wonderland, but because of recent travel, Alice has been interspersed with various versions of Peter Pan — and, like me, Benjamin is hooked on the J.M. Barrie story. He likes it in all its forms. I’m only really a fan of Barrie’s novelization (although I admit that the musical stage production can be amazing).

To me, this is a book worth exploring, and I do want Benjamin to know it well, but we will have to have many talks about its more perverse elements. For now, he just likes the flying and fighting, which is what I suspect most children focus on.

I’m enjoying reading the negative reviews on Amazon from horrified grownups. I excerpt a few of them here.

By Jackie M. Bachenberg:

I certainly wouldn’t recommend reading this to a 5 or 6 year old before they drift off to sleep. There are just too many references to the fact that Dad in particular, may not have wanted all three of those children. There is also a very healthy amount of violence that you just might not want your elementary kid listening to. Peter cut off Hook’s arm and threw it to the crocodile. The lost boys are always fighting either the “redskins” or the pirates. And if you’re into the politically correct, this book is not. Instead of using the modern day “native American” we’re given “redskin”. I don’t have a problem with it, but I can just see the furor it would cause if Jr. goes to school and calls his little native American classmate a redskin.

By Katherine A. Kennedy:

I picked up what I thought would be a playful fairy tale and got just that; for I had forgotten about the cannibalistic witch in Hansel and Gretel, about the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid, and about the Wolf in the original telling of Little Red Riding Hood. This is a haunting and horrific tale of abuse and neglect masked with the innocent ideals of childhood. It came to a chilling conclusion and will stay with me for quite a while.

I am quite impressed that the themes in this book were so elegantly masked as to double as a children’s story as well as an adult story with very disturbing themes. I will keep my copy of this book, but it certainly won’t be the first thing that I read to my daughter out-loud.

By Daniel Mackler:

The extreme: The perverse sexual dynamics. I feel the author set up Peter Pan and Wendy and Tinker Bell as a vile little love-sex triangle. If you think I’m nuts writing this, look at all the obvious romantic dynamics between Peter and Wendy alone, and then add in the EXTREME jealousy and rage of Tinker Bell over this, and note how the author radically sexualized Tinker Bell – how she was an adult woman, how she flaunted her sexuality, how she dressed in ways that best showed off her body. (Even the OLD version of the book I have shows Tinker Bell as a definite woman, not a girl, dressed sexy and flirting with a DEFINITELY pre-pubescent boy.)

To back up my point, imagine the genders of the characters flipped, with Peter Pan being a little prepubescent girl and Tinker Bell a man, constantly flaunting his adult body for a girl’s attention, and flying into rages and trying to literally kill off the romantic competition? Sick!! It would be called pedophilia.

And then the whole dynamics with Wendy being Peter’s mother-lover: not healthy!

Forwarded by Scott Lahti: