De Beers, the diamond merchants, and specialists in certain disciplines are wealthy for exactly the same reasons. They both have something that is rare. It De Beer’s case, it is diamonds. In the doctor’s case it is his skills as a physician. I earn a salary way above the average for no reason other than [...]

No one has said that living on the minimum wage was fun or comfortable. The 25c per hour increase that the National Government has approved will not change that. It barely keeps pace with inflation. But that is not the point of the minimum wage. It is the minimum. It is not meant to be [...]

Most tax-funded subsidies produce weird incentives that cause overuse and/or overproduction of a product or service. Witness that enormous blow-out in physiotherapy costs as soon as the subsidy effectively made visits free. But there are occasional government subsidies that are economically worthwhile. The tax subsidy that encourages overseas movie producers to film here and, especially [...]

Hark! What is that strange disembodied twittering that I hear? Is it a ghost? A telephone answering machine? a vague afterthought? Yes! It’s all three ! It’s the Invisible Phil…
Once again, Phil abandons invisibility in order to utter an inanity. It’s rather like watching a Klingon Bird of Prey on Star Trek, de-cloaking and firing, [...]

There is a lot of buzz in the newspapers and the blogosphere about the minimum wage and the rather absurd proposal that it be elevated from $12.50 to $15.00 – a 20% increase. Essentially the minimum wage is a pay rise forced upon employers by government, rather than negotiated between employees and employers. As such, [...]

Paula Bennett has turned her attention to invalid beneficiaries. In a carefully worded statement, she says:
“This Government will support those that cannot work.
“I just want to be clear that this is not a blanket 85,000 people having to walk through the doors of Work and Income in the first month or something,” Ms Bennett told [...]

In a fine example of badly thought-out interfering law, Labour legislated work breaks last year, causing enormous difficulty for small businesses with low-levels of staff. The most obvious example were the solo air-traffic controllers at places like Invercargill who were suddenly obliged to leave their screens unattended (or find another fully-qualified air traffic controller to [...]

Beneficiary statistics are out again and, as usual, Labour attacks the government for expanding numbers. Paula Bennett calmly points out that this is purely secondary to the recession and she is right. The fact that few companies have chosen to move to a nine-day fortnight and few people have taken up the restart program are [...]

The MacDoctor was doing locums (aka mercenary medicine) for about five years and only settled in a position this year. Technically, of course, all jobs could be considered mercenary, to some extent, because few of us would work if we didn’t get paid for it. However, there is no doubt that money is the most [...]

Remember Helen Clark’s “keep ‘em in school” plan’s? John Key cried “me too” and has followed through with a scheme for employing young workers. Proper apprenticing schemes have yet to be set up.
It is a pity that politicians usually have egos that are too big to be humbled, because it seems that normal market forces [...]