Democracy and Power 108: ObfuscationWherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true. Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity. —Hans F. Sennholz

In Tuesday's State of the Union Address, President Obama proposed raising the federally mandated minimum wage to $9 per hour, a 24% increase over the current mandate. In a subsequent conversation, my friend David Guenther of the Texas Public Policy Foundation made a good point about the effects of this if it were to come to pass:

The state of the union is “screwed.”