Quote of the Day: Free Market is a Bathroom Scale

"The free market is not an ideology or a creed or something we're supposed to take on faith, it's a measurement. It's a bathroom scale. I may hate what I see when I step on the bathroom scale, but I can't pass a law saying I weigh 160 pounds. Authoritarian governments think they can pass that law—a law to change the measurement of things."

~P.J. O'Rourke quoted in today's WSJ

Exhibit A: The minimum wage law.  A teenager with no work experience steps on a "bathroom scale" that accurately and truthfully measures the market value of  unskilled labor, and the scale says "$5.00 per hour."  Politicians pass minimum wage legislation to rig the "bathroom scale" of labor value to instead produce an inaccurate, false inflated reading of "$7.25 per hour."  And they then seem puzzled that more than one out of every four teenagers who is looking for a job is unable to find one, but that's what happens when you "rig" the "bathroom scale."