“Asking a liberal where prices and wages come from is like asking a six-year old where babies come from.” -Thomas Sowell

It’s all come to this, the final showdown. The third and final part of my debate with Mr. S begins on page 2 after a brief aside. This third part contains a lot of graphs and charts that present data in an easy-to-digest form, but also has enormous walls of text. Wait, that’s how I’m going to start this? Let me try this again: Inside you’ll find many of my arguments presented with pictures to visually represent vast amounts of data, making it easier to see and understand. (There, that’s much more fun!)

What was originally to be a debate on the minimum wage has since ballooned into a nearly all-encompassing discussion on the role of government in economics and society. On the one hand I hate having to respond to a dozen other topics, but on the other hand these topics are all interrelated. In the end, a debate on the government’s role in the minimum wage, child labor, or welfare essentially boils down to the same underlying argument: statism versus self-determination. In the previous two parts of this debate things got out of hand but thankfully this time everything is wrapped up nicely, so there’s no need to fear another round of this debate, this showdown against statism. Or as I like to call responding to statist arguments: Whack-a-mole. Because their arguments pop up frequently and predictably, and I use the hammer of truth to slam them back down.

It benefits us that Mr. S is so headstrong in his argumentation because it means every nitty-gritty detail is brought to light and resolved. Speaking of bringing things to light, I have to explain something that I left out of the debate below. Inflation is being tempered by banks sitting on excess funds. Inflation is only around 2% officially because most money isn’t in circulation (also because the CPI measures only consumer goods). Banks don’t want to lend out their money because the interest rate is so low that they couldn’t make a good return off it. This is why even though the money supply has been greatly expanded, we aren’t experiencing hyperinflation (yet). You can read more about this situation here. But for now, on with round 3!

Next page: The start of the debate