No, lol, not at all. I was being sarcastic. A minimum wage is about the least of our worries. A topic for another thread.
Oh, my gosh. Several big ones. Perhaps the biggest change is my thinking on medical care. For years I thought the answer was more competition and trading more risk for deregulation -- More or Less a Milton Friedman "free market" approach. But at some point a few years ago I woke up and realized the freedom of both the buyer and seller to walk away from a deal they don't like was missing from medicine. That freedom to walk is absolutely essential to successful free market, Adam Smith capitalism. Even though relatively unregulated, medicine did work fairly well in America, it seems, for the better part of two centuries when physicians, apparently under the influence of their oath and the inferred responsibility of noblesse oblige, voluntarily held their capitalist instincts in check. The confluence of government-sector medicare and medicaid, private-sector, employer-paid insurance, and big-clinic medical practice soon enough revealed the defect in reliance on voluntary adherence to charitable principles if money is at stake. The result has been an unruly monster, transformed, through the agency of complete regulatory capture, into a government-protected cartel consisting of a myriad of special interests. It was finally clear to me that although piecemeal introduction of more competition might result in better access and outcomes by lowering costs somewhat, a true free market capitalist solution to our medical care woes would be impossible. There was a good reason, I discovered, that all other countries handled medical care differently than the U.S. We are doomed to keep tinkering with a hopelessly failed enterprise until we recognize the fundamentally flawed nature of our useless efforts. Another area in which I have made a see change in my thinking is in economics. I am embarrassed now to go back to 2005 and realize the nonsense I posted. Like nearly all Americans then, and still a majority today, I thought taxes provided the income the government needed in order to spend. The government might be able to temporarily spend above its revenue so long as it could borrow by selling its bonds. I believed that too much government borrowing would drive up interest rates, crowd out private sector borrowing*, etc. Keynes argued that structural deficits should be avoided, but advocated governments spending in deficit to compensate for the people reducing spending in recessions. I was happy to point out that Keynes also thought when good times returned, the government should run surpluses to reduce its debt. These are all ideas easy to understand as they are consistent with our understanding of how we should handle our personal finances. Nevertheless, although these concepts may have held some validity in times past, particularly under the artificial constraint we placed on ourselves under a gold standard, today I recognize these ideas as quite incorrect. (Incidentally, we found a gold standard to be unsustainable after of only twenty years! I cringe when I hear of people today advocating going back to a gold standard, as though one should want to even were it possible.) I now recognize that my traditional view of government spending taxing and borrowing was wrong. Governments are the source of money. Taxes and productivity give money value. Bonds serve different purposes than the raising of money to spend. Governments that issue fiat money always "money finance" their purchases. That is to say they always spend in deficit before they borrow, something we individuals can not do. I now fully subscribe to what Abba Lerner wrote in 1943. This view represents a radical departure from the views I held 15 or more years ago. The central idea is that government fiscal policy, its spending and taxing, its borrowing and repayment of loans, its issue of money, and its withdrawal of money [from the economy] shall be undertaken with an eye only to the results of these actions on the economy and not to any established traditional doctrine about what is sound or unsound. -- Lerner, Abba P. in "Functional Finance and the Federal Debt," Social Research, Vol. 10, pg. 39. (1943)._____________________ *I was in good company, I am quite certain Alan Greenspan believed this as well. This must have been what was on his mind when he wrote of his concern that entitlements might crowd out investment. Today, I am convinced this traditional view is generally wrong. I also now recognize that Greenspan's monumental mistake was his faith in the traditional view that if markets are far out of wack ("irrationally exuberant") they will harmlessly, and spontaneously return to equilibrium if left alone to market forces. In reality, markets out of wack are far more likely to get even more out of wack than they are to return to equilibrium.