[wnewman]

Insignificant price controls don't make much difference, so it's basically a wash. Significant price controls tend to have predictable perverse effects. It seems to be impolite to report them: for some years, every time I read a story about long gas lines somewhere, I go searching for information to verify that yes, it was under a system of gas price controls, and generally I can verify it with enough poking around in search engines. But it seems very uncommon for it to be reported in the news story about gas lines. Because gas lines just happen, like sunspots, you know?

If you think modern levels of intervention in the labor market --- not just minimum wage, but mandatory benefits and a host of other things --- have been imposed with such a marvellously deft touch that they shouldn't cause persistent failure of labor markets to clear, it is possible to dream up other reasons that might conceivably explain the observed outcome of historically high long term unemployment. Not everyone finds those explanations convincing, though.

[fnordfnordfnord]

>Insignificant price controls don't make much difference, so it's basically a wash. Significant price controls tend to have predictable perverse effects. It seems to be impolite to report them: for some years, every time I read a story about long gas lines somewhere, I go searching for information to verify that yes, it was under a system of gas price controls, and generally I can verify it with enough poking around in search engines. But it seems very uncommon for it to be reported in the news story about gas lines. Because gas lines just happen, like sunspots, you know?

What is this? I don't even...

>If you think modern levels of intervention in the labor market --- not just minimum wage, but mandatory benefits and a host of other things --- have been imposed with such a marvellously deft touch

I don't.

>that they shouldn't cause persistent failure of labor markets to clear, it is possible to dream up other reasons that might conceivably explain the observed outcome of historically high long term unemployment. Not everyone finds those explanations convincing, though.

Whether you like the fact that our economy is putzed around by central planners is a different topic. I'll approach this with the foregone conclusion that it's what we're stuck with, and that we have to find a way to live with it. Actually, central planning has little to do with the obvious necessity that the people who live in and around our communities must be able to support themselves, and if they cannot; then that problem will sort itself out either through social programs paid by taxes, charity, the population's mobility, or as a last resort theft and violence.