Conservatives are sometimes accused of being dispassionate in communicating their ideas. Republicans may have great policy ideas, but no one is moved by policy speeches. Liberals sometimes do a better job of attaching a story or a human interest anecdote to their causes. On Tuesday night my economics class had both; Dr. Rustici’s ideology was right and he illustrated it masterfully.
Dr. Rustici is a very enthusiastic lecturer, but Tuesday he was in rare form. Having spent several classes laying a foundation in economic theory, we finally began to apply that theory to public policy. The majority of the class Tuesday night was spent discussing price controls.
Dr. Rustici began by describing the gas shortages of the 1970s. As children of the 1980s, my classmates were incredulous that such a condition could really exist in America. Rustici showed the origin of the problem in Nixon-era legislation designed to bring gas prices down. Yes, history validates the economic claim that price ceilings will cause a shortage. By the point in the lecture when Rustici quoted Jimmy Carter telling the American people to keep the thermostat low and wear sweaters, the students were almost angry over the idiocy of economic ignorance. Don’t be “fuelish”!? What an outrage!
Perhaps Dr. Rustici’s stronger illustration was with the sensitive topic of minimum wage. The primary economic argument against minimum wage is that it causes unemployment, especially among the lowest class of workers. Raising the minimum wage causes these often-disadvantaged workers to be more costly than they are worth to employers, so they must be laid off. This is a logical concept in theory, but Rustici made it hit home by sharing a story from his family history.
I include his illustration below if you have time to read on:
The Rustici family immigrated to Kansas City from Sicily. My teacher’s grandparents were both uneducated, but they were determined to make it in America. Mr. Rustici was a large man, more than six feet tall, who found his niche working for the railroad. Mr. Rustici was so successful, in fact, that his employer actually paid him extra above his union-negotiated wages. Unfortunately Mr. Rustici began to lose his eyesight. As his eyesight worsened his employer moved him from job to job to keep him employed. Eventually Mr. Rustici’s vision got so bad that there was nothing else he could do for the railroad company. The company had to let him go.
With the lone breadwinner out of a job, the Rustici family was in a bind. The two Rustici children were 10 and 7 years old. It was decided that the older boy–my teacher’s father–must go to work. In spite of the Great Depression Mrs. Rustici was able to arrange for the boy to work for a Sicilian baker. Not surprisingly this did not provide enough money for the family. They exhausted their savings, and began to sell their belongings. Eventually a neighbor realized the family’s desperate situation and worked with churches and charity groups to find simple piecework that Mr. Rustici could do in his home.
The addition of this new source of income allowed the family to get back on their feet. The Rustici household again had food on the table. But the story does not end here. There was a problem with the new arrangment: Mr. Rustici’s work was breaking minimum wage laws.
One day a bureaucrat from the National Recovery Administration knocked at the door of the Rustici home. “Ma’am,” he explained, “I’ve heard that someone in this house is undercutting the minimum wage.” He proceeded to tell them that the piecework must stop. Mrs. Rustici explained the situation to the man. He told her, “It’s not my business to find you work or food; it’s my business to enforce the law. You have to stop.”
As the man turned to leave Mrs. Rustici said, “God took his eyesight, but you’ve taken something more important—his pride. You’ve told him he is worth nothing.”
In conclusion Dr. Rustici urged us to remember that the minimum wage hurts people who are at the greated disadvantage.
With this sobering example of the fruit ill-conceived economic policy Dr. Rustici moved from teaching economics to convincing skeptical minds. As evidence of this, I had a liberal fellow student tell me this weekend how the class has made her realize how misguided Democratic economic policy often is.
I have been excited to see that many of the other stories and illustrations in my econ class are ones that I have heard in my economics classes at BJU. Coming from BJU I have a stronger background in free market economics than some of my classmates.