One of the first tenets of free-market thinking is that nobody owes anybody else a job – much less a minimum wage or the right to double-time pay for working more than – say – 40 hours a week.
In a genuinely free market, all job security and remuneration ultimately depend upon the ability to satisfy a paying customer – whether that is the employer or (for the owner or owners of the business) the people buying the final product, whatever that may be. As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it, the marketplace acts as “a daily referendum of what is to be produced and who is to produce it.”
No one understands all this any better than Andy Puzder, the chief executive of Saint Louis-based CKE Restaurants, Inc. and Donald Trump’s selection to become Secretary of Labor, as demonstrated in the lecture above, delivered at the John Cook School of Business at Saint Louis University on October 18, 2011.
The Show-Me Institute partnered with the business school in sponsoring the event. In his lecture, Puzder showed how increasing regulation in labor markets had stifled entrepreneurship and undermined job creation.
Puzder put it quite clearly: Reduce regulation, and watch unemployment drop and businesses grow.
The Show-Me Institute has been tracking those same issues in many articles and blog posts by our own writers and policy analysts. Go here and here for articles of mine in the Weekly Standard – the first (“Jobberwocky Lives: You can’t keep regulating the workplace without killing jobs,” Sept. 7, 2015, issue) and the second (“Killing the Golden Goose: How Walmart’s left-wing critics destroy jobs,” Nov. 30, 2015, issue).
