[scaeagles]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Whether one is too ignorant to look past what's in it for me is no excuse for not immediately recognizing that such a philosophy is likely to cause harm to everyone who isn't you.

I would say the same thing for supposedly compassionate ideas that are not thought out to their conclusion. As in -

"Whether one is too ignorant to see the unintended consequences of what sounds like a compassionate idea is no excuse to not immediately recognize that such a philosophy is likely to cause harm to those the idea was intended to assist, and most likely to others as well."

For example, right now there is a ballot proposition in AZ to increase the minimum wage. "Evil Republicans!", the cry echoes through the liberal households. "Don't they know that one cannot raise a family on $5.15 an hour?".

It sounds compassionate to raise the minimum wage. However, it is the exact opposite.

I will be quoting an economist named Walter Williams from this article.

The U.S. Department of Labor reports: "According to Current Population Survey estimates for 2004, some 73.9 million American workers were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.8 percent of all wage and salary workers. Of those paid by the hour, 520,000 were reported as earning exactly $5.15."

Workers earning the minimum wage or less tend to be young, single workers between the ages of 16 and 25. Only about two percent of workers over 25 years of age earn minimum wages.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: ..... only 5.3 percent of minimum wage earners are from households below the official poverty line; forty percent of minimum wage earners live in households with incomes $60,000 and higher; and, over 82 percent of minimum wage earners do not have dependents.

So....only 18% of of 520,000 minimum wage earners have dependents, or less than 100,000 workers.

However, what are the negative effects of raising the minimum wage?

Two important surveys of academic economists were reported in two issues of the American Economic Review, May 1979 and May 1992. In one survey, 90 percent, and in the other 80 percent, of economists agreed that increasing the minimum wage causes unemployment among youth and low-skilled workers.

So raising the minimum wage has an affect of increasing unemployment among lower skilled workers, when in fact not many people at all have are trying to raise a family on minimum wage. I would also argue, though not from this article, that a raise in the minimum wage delays raises to established workers. The article itself has much more info than I have quoted.

Nice sounding, compassionate idea to raise the minimum wage. Bad idea to raise the minimum wage, as the unintended consequences are not good at all.

So....what is my point in all of this? That compassion that is not thought through, no matter how good it sounds, is the opposite. I will not subscribe to an idea simply because it sounds compassionate. And I will not be called evil because I investigate and dislike some compassionate sounding ideas.