Access your downloads at our archive site. Visit Archive
Blog

Wage Angst

A recurring theme in the Wall Street Journal, especially the economy section, is the angst in the halls of economic academia over the slow rise in wages and productivity in this last recovery.o

  • Roger Oliver
Share this

A recurring theme in the Wall Street Journal, especially the economy section, is the angst in the halls of economic academia over the slow rise in wages and productivity in this last recovery.

Skipping over our doubts about it being a recovery, why the angst over wages? The articles always flood the reader with statistics and interpretations that can easily bamboozle you. They give the impression that the economy is a machine that you can tweak and control. But the economy is not an entity, it is a composite of the decisions of millions of people.

Modern egghead economists are completely oblivious to the damage they do to individuals and families. There are no tweaks; there is only the government whale that unpredictably swims by and swamps your boat. And the government whale swims where these eggheads tell it.

Agreement among economists is a myth. In a political economy, whichever economist has the ear of the political class this week gets to tell the whole where to swim. It swims around unpredictably from here to there making rational economic decisions nearly impossible. The only positive news in the WSJ on this front was in a couple of recent articles that reported the mystery of a market that seems to be ignoring the Federal Reserve Bank’s attempts to control the economy through monetary policy.

What good are increasing wages if you can't buy anything with the money anyway? Yep, Increasing wages or at least the hope of increasing wages, are necessary to keep us hoi palloi quiet while the price of everything we buy goes up. You can't tweak inflation to only increase wages. An increase in wages increases the price of the stuff we buy with our wages. This is as sure as gravity but most economists live in a fairy tale world of mythical time machines and anti-gravity devices.

This angst over slow wage increases is the Keynesian nonsense that ignores the consequences of violating God's ethical/judicial laws. Inflation is only a necessary fact of life in an unjust political economy with the abomination of unjust weights and measures known as fiat money. God will not be mocked. A nation will reap what it sows.


  • Roger Oliver

Roger Oliver serves as a missionary in Puebla, Mexico. He and his wife, Marcy spend most of their time at the Pierre Viret Learning Center, a Christian academy, preschool through high school. Their local church meets in the Learning Center. They sponsor a web page www.visionamericalatina.com to promote Christian reconstruction in Latin America. Roger is a partner in a furniture manufacturing company. The business exists to provide employment to the families in the community, to help the community become independent, to generate capital for other family businesses and as a venue for vocational discipleship. He retired from the US Army in 1992. He earned his MBA at Syracuse University for the Army and completed a ThM in Bible Exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary.

More by Roger Oliver