What causes an economy to prosper is giving freedom to the people who are able to produce new products and services that other people want. It's really as simple as that. If you allow the productive people to be productive and you don't penalize them for being productive through excessive taxation and excessive regulation, an economy will prosper.

Syndicated columnist and author, Ben Shapiro

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A minimum wage requirement always impacts an economy horrifically. A minimum wage doesn’t work and always increases unemployment. It's just basic common sense that the minute you tell people that they have to pay more for labor, they're going to buy fewer units. If the price is raised on gasoline, people tend to buy less gasoline, if the price is raised on cereal, less cereal will be sold and if the price of labor is raised, people tend to buy less labor.

Syndicated columnist and author, Ben Shapiro

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The government should do very little. The government's only job in an economy should be to prevent things like fraud, but other than this, in my opinion, the government should play very little role. It's not their job to push particular programs and or businesses, it's their job to get out of the way, and to allow people who earn and produce products that other people want, to do just that.

When the government does become involved , it's almost invariably detrimental. For example, people like to say that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is evidence that when the government becomes involved, things become better, but the fact is that all it does is create more hazard by encouraging people not to conduct their research before investing in things like stock.

Whenever the government gets involved, all they tend to do is shift burdens from those who are less productive to those who are more productive. They tend to do things like reduce productivity, over-regulate when they seek to merely prevent basic things like fraud and redistribute according to the legislator's favorite businesses or interests. Nothing good generally happens when the government gets involved in the economy.

Syndicated columnist and author, Ben Shapiro

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Workers unions play an important role in the economy unless they start beating people up. Collective bargaining is not anti-free market, rather, collective bargaining is an element of the free market and if workers get together and decide to strike for higher pay that's absolutely their prerogative. On the other hand, what is not their prerogative is to beat up those people who cross the picket lines, because at that point it's not a matter of economics. The fact is that you don't have a right to beat up person up just because there is a certain job which somebody is willing to fill for lower pay.

So unions have a role but only as long as there's actual unanimity and only as long as the workers actually agree to participate, but not if there's coercive behavior and bullying.

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The wealthy in this country are by and large the job creators. Tax them, and they will cut jobs because it impedes their ability to create. Money only stretches so far so it's not a matter of the wealthy simply wanting to earn more, but a matter of making prudent decisions that don't deplete their capital in a time when they could lose everything in a weak market. If they're not creating jobs now, they'll be cutting jobs if the taxes rise.

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I think a flat tax or a national sales tax in the mold of the fair tax would be most effective. Either one of those two options would be fine with me as long as the rate is somewhere around 20%.

The truth is that if you talk simply in terms of effectiveness, the most effective thing is to not tax the upper end of the income bracket very much at all because those people are the ones actually earning money, producing products, providing services and hiring people. A flat tax is the best balance between equity and efficiency. I think it's perfectly equitable because by nature percentages are perfectly equitable - it's not a flat sum, it's a flat rate. If someone has a smaller pie, a smaller piece will be taken out of the pie.

In terms of efficiency, a national sales tax is probably slightly more efficient, because it allows consumers to buy products based on their actual needs and desires, and to decide for themselves how much they want to be taxed. If they don't want to be taxed very much, they don't have to buy luxury items.

Syndicated columnist and author, Ben Shapiro

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I think people disagree because they start from different premises. I think one of the great fallacies of conservative thought is that liberals have no logic to them. Liberals absolutely have a logic to them, it's just that they are starting from an incredibly different premise. They're starting from the premise that there are basically no rights in the individual, all rights reside in the state and it is the job of the state to equally distribute these rights among individuals. Conservatives believe that there are certain inherent rights in the individual and the government no matter how legitimately constructed has no right to violate those rights.

If the majority suggested that they wanted to kill the minority, according to conservatives that would be a problem, but according to liberals it may not be as much of a problem. We see that in communist states around the world, where they have no problem killing the minorities in large numbers.

So they start from different premises and once you start from different premises you can make logical arguments on both fronts and people disagree. Law and politics is basically like an iceberg, and what people spend their time arguing over is the 10 percent above the water and they never attack the 90 percent that is below the water even though it is actually the important part.

Most people on the right agree that there are certain moral principles which cannot be violated, most people on the left believe that morality is created by the minds of men and is therefore changeable and malleable. These are very significant differences in the way that we see the world, because of basic premises not misapplied logic.

Syndicated columnist and author, Ben Shapiro

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