All government laws are ultimately enforced by violence or threat of violence, often referred to as "at gunpoint".

No voluntary, honest, harmless transaction between mentally competent adults should be prohibited by law.

No single person has the right to point a gun at me and say "you must pay him at least $15.00 an hour." A group does not gain new rights by adding members, so no group, howsoever formed, even if it calls itself a government, has the right to point a gun at me and say "you must pay him at least $15.00 an hour."

Minimum wages laws are a moral obscenity, and have no place in a civil society.

The economy is nothing but money trading hands.

The economy is goods changing hands, and services being performed, for considerations, usually with money as an intermediary. That you think money motion is the economy disqualifies you from economic discussions.

No, he's not saying that there is an upper limit beyond which a minimum wage becomes harmful, he's saying that the entire rationale behind a minimum wage is bogus.

No oil wells in Haiti. Nor much in the line of tech industries, or a good workforce.

So if the "free market" rate for a haircut is $10/hour and the minimum wage is raised to $15/hour then everyone will stop getting hair cuts?

I've been cutting my own hair for 47 years.

Or if it costs $10/hour to make toothbrushes then raising the minimum wage above $10/hour will cause everyone to stop brushing their teeth?

That sentence is incoherent.

You have just committed the logical fallacy of false dichotomy. The missing alternative is to pay them nothing for doing nothing.

Consumption ... drives the economy.

Wrong. You can't consume what hasn't been produced. Production comes first; production is fundamental.

Money kept in local banks is generally goes 3 ways: local house loans, local business loans, and federal government bonds (mandated by law). Big banks, like BOA, is where most of the funny business occurs. Big business seldom needs bank loans for long term capital, they have access to money sources like stock offerings and commercial bonds.

Too bad your post and your sig contradict.

The senate is a bastion of corruption now. The important factor is to whom the senators must answer.

Easy home brewing of mind-degrading drugs is the drug cartels' worst nightmare. Cartels disappear almost overnight as US citizens can brew drugs at far below the cartel cost of production.

<sarcasm> Yes, I'm sure the Crips and Bloods, and the south of the border cartels, are just full of Republicans. </sarcasm>

Supply and demand. Fracking petroleum increased supply, so price falls. Economics can't predict discoveries, and can only give good guesses that at certain prices levels previously uneconomic supplies would slowly come to market, driving down prices.

That bit sounds easy, but there are lots of things going on in the world, and they interact. Some long term trends can be predicted by honest, intelligent, and informed economists, but many things are outside of good prediction. What these good economists can do is point out that certain types of government policy will tend to cause what types of results.

First, you have to define inflation. Classical economics defines inflation as any increase in the money supply. It would not be unreasonable to modify that to read that inflation is an increase in the money supply beyond the increase in population. Modern misinformation says that something like the cost of living index is inflation. Note that the CPI, for example, is a measure requiring much calculation and subject to political pressure, which is a strong argument for not using it.

For money to be a store of value, the rate of inflation must be very close to zero. This is more important than any illusory economy boosting that comes from large amounts of inflation, and inflation always creates political pressure for more and faster inflation. However, the damage caused by negative inflation probably exceeds the damage caused by an equal amount of positive inflation.

My judgement is that the target value for inflation, strictly enforced, should be that the money supply should increase between 0% and 0.5% faster than the population.

55% of Americans are invested in stocks. Are you saying that 55% of Americans are rich?