What the heck? There are three Croatians on here?
Is this empirical proof that we are smarter than most nationalities? I think so!
Croatia is in my opinion the best pound for pound footballing nation at the moment.
I guess you haven’t heard of Spain. 
Pound for pound Uruguay is the best. No contest.
I have always been an advocate for a new Yugoslavia just because the soccer team would be so insane.
C’mon guys! Don’t mix soccer and econmics. 
To get back on track:
My two cents is the following: Laws can cause “sticky wages” and so can voluntary contracts.
The price of labor is very politicized. Labor and the interest rate are the two most heavily controlled prices. Empirical evidence is, therefore, of little or no use in determining the behavior of labor prices in a natural order, that is, in a free market. The price of labor is indeed buoyed upward (sticky downward) by a whole raft of incomprehensible, overlapping and contradictory statutes, regulation and oversight. Minimum wage laws, regulations on mandatory employment benefits, public employment benefits (the State is a competitor with private industry for labor), legal protection and subsidization of unions are all examples of the many ways in which the price of labor is pulled this way and that by political forces.
But I see no fundamental economic reason why the price of labor should be different than any other price, except insomuch as very low-end, grunt labor may be more likely to resort to crime as a substitute for honest labor, thus explaining the tendency for menial workers in low-skill industries to form powerful political unions.
Clayton -
“My two cents is the following: Laws can cause “sticky wages” and so can voluntary contracts.”
Voluntary contracts can be voluntarily broken. It absolutely makes no difference whether there is a formal contract or not. A piece of paper cannot cause sticky wages.
We really should not ever equivocally compare voluntary contracts with State laws.
It seems to me that only highly productive jobs may have long-term contracts which make them difficult to break due to the cost of doing such. An example would be a contract between a football team and a football player. Sometimes the team rather keep the player on the team, even while not playing him, because he is too expensive to fire. I think that DD5 is absolutely correct regarding the majority of jobs in an economy, however. I signed a contract with my employer, but that contract states he can let me go whenever and as he sees fit. What currently makes it expensive to fire me are state laws, not the contract itself.
Those are the kinds of contracts I was speaking about. Thanks.
And let’s not get into the “sell yourself as a slave” debate again. We got a few other threads for that one!
Here’s a new question: if Mises believes that all unemployment is voluntary, then is he suggesting an equilibrium for the labor market at all times?
Neoclassical, I think I addressed this in one of my original posts on this thread. In Human Action Mises does hold that in a completely free market all unemployment is voluntary. Retrospectively, I don’t think Mises would deny the more modern Austrian approach to economics of disequilibrium (which is the even as far back as the late-1960s and 1970s).
Neoclassical; your question has been answered before.
they have 10 times as many people. I said pound-for-pound, that is sports iingo for per capita.
Why would you wonder?
Because sticky wages are a market imperfection, and I figured you brushed those under the rug.
Sloppy
More sloppiness.
Why so serious?
Because the length of my life, my “time” is my most precious resource and it is tiresome reading lazy thoughts from participants who are lazy as a form of entertainment, not due to an irreversible character flaw. I could almost understand it if you weren’t bright, but you are very bright.
Isn’t one simple reason that wages are ‘sticky’ is that we know our wage rate in advance, usually for a whole year? Just for psychological reasons alone, doesn’t that make it difficult to handle/accept lower wages rapidly when conditions demand them? I imagine if most of us worked straight commission or were paid a daily wage, we could probably adjust more easily to falling wages when market conditions changed.
It really depends. The stickiness of wages various from one individual to the next. Some are flexible, others are extremely hostile to wage reductions. Some will accept wage reductions if they realize that the firm must do it in order to survive, others will accept wage reductions as long as wages are cut across the board. It’s not a praxeological law.
Either way, wage rigidity is a problem for the rational expectations crowd and not for the Austrians. Individuals would accept lower wages because, at least according to rational expectations, they would eventually realize that accepting a lower wage means preventing mass unemployment.