Author: Redactor

free trade & free markets too much government

Work, Shirk, or Bug Out?

Which is better: helping the working poor through regulations on business, mandating employee benefits, and cushy hire-and-fire terms . . . or through higher unemployment benefits, assistance to families, or other direct aid?

Both yield unfortunate consequences.

Italy’s employment policies protect workers, on paper. Whatever the ostensible worker salary is in the country, the mandated benefits cost the employer more than twice as much.

This proved a problem for businessman Fabrizio Pedroni, whose factory near Medona hasn’t made a profit in five years. He blames high taxes, heavy regulatory burden, and low worker productivity. So, while his employees were off on holiday, he packed up his factory and shipped it to Poland.

Actually, the tail end of his move was stymied, for a while, by a hasty union blockade. Pedroni cited this as evidence for his need to bug out in secret. Had he announced the plan, the government would have just taken the property for the benefit of his employees. “I had three options — either close, move the factory, as many other businesses have done, or shoot myself in the head.”

Meanwhile, a new Cato study shows that in 16 of our United States, a “combination of food stamps, temporary cash grants, WIC, and housing assistance is worth a pre-tax value more than $30,000” to families that qualify. For some, it’s much easier to live well unemployed than employed.

No wonder unemployment persists. And economic recovery is so slow.

In both cases, programs to help everyday folks hurt them in the long run, undermining productivity, increasing dependence, and scuttling the source of progress: business enterprise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags Italy, regulation, wage legislation, welfare state

Thought

William Wilberforce

It is the true duty of every man to promote the happiness of his fellow creatures to the utmost of his power.
— William Wilberforce

national politics & policies too much government

Unions of Opposites

Not everything in Dr. Obama’s garden is coming up roses.

Even erstwhile — or perhaps masochistic — supporters of the thorny “Obamacare” legislation have sought exemptions from its costs and mandates, or complained about its “unexpected” destructive impact.

The AFL-CIO, for example, laments that employers otherwise subject to Obamacare mandates need not provide health insurance for employees working less than a certain number of hours. To get below the threshold, some big employers are systematically slashing employee hours. This trend may “[destroy] the 40-hour work week.” Oops.

Also thanks to Obamacare, some health insurance coverage is being excised from existing compensation packages, such as coverage for employees’ spouses. United Parcel Service has just joined the ranks of employers lopping such benefits. The company says Obamacare’s costs and mandates are a big part of the reason.

Not so fast, UPS! Isn’t this a biased misreading of the situation, as some experts claim? Bear with me here. According to the New York Times, “Several health care experts . . . said they believed the company was motivated by a desire to hold down health care costs, rather than because of cost increases under the law.” See, it’s not that UPS is trying to lessen the impact of cost increases; they’re only trying to reduce costs.

“Apples and oranges” or “six of one/half dozen of the other”?

One may as well pretend that persons breaking out of jail seek freedom when in fact they are merely endeavoring to escape imprisonment.

Let us not confuse such starkly opposite things. Thank you, experts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags ObamaCare, UPS

Thought

William Wilberforce

When we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all human conduct, what is there in this life that should make any man contradict the dictates of his conscience, the principles of justice, the laws of religion, and of God?

links

Townhall: (B)Rand Recognition

Post author By Redactor
Post date August 25, 2013
No Comments on Townhall: (B)Rand Recognition

Over at Townhall, your weekly Common Sense columnist begins by asking whether the Republican Party is about to define itself out of existence, and continues by looking at the long-term ideological polarization that both parties are undergoing. Click on over, and then back here for some back-up:

EconTalk, with Russ Roberts — Morris Fiorina on Polarization, Stability, and the State of the Electorate
Reason Hit & Run blog — Peter King: ‘Rand Paul has set the Republican Party back 50 years’
Politico — Chris Christie: Rand Paul ‘dangerous’
Common Sense with Paul Jacob — Another Trout in the Milk

Thought

William Wilberforce

If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.

Thought

William Wilberforce

You may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.

video

Video: Jesse Walker on Good, Old-Fashioned American Paranoia

Post author By Redactor
Post date August 24, 2013
1 Comment on Video: Jesse Walker on Good, Old-Fashioned American Paranoia

It’s an old tradition, and not just relegated to “the fringes”:

Jesse Walker’s book is now available. Here’s an excerpt. Here’s an interview for reading, and here’s another.

Walker works for Reason magazine, and you know what that means — Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie interviewed his comrade:

And here he is, reading from his new book, at Politics & Prose:

Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

The National Confessional

Secrecy in diplomacy and intelligence-gathering is supposed to protect the nation. But secrecy also protects bad policy . . . including great crimes that undermine our security.

This week, the National Security Archive released onto the Web the first official admission that agents of the United States government brought down — by assassination and violent coup — Iran’s democratically elected president, Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, 60 years ago:

The explicit reference to the CIA’s role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 . . . but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release.

The sunsetting of the secrecy provisions on the information finally provides sunlight, transparency, to this crucial moment in history.

Crucial, because it involved public American support for Masaddeq’s successor, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, “the Shah of Iran.” The Shah became quite brutal in his embrace of “modernism” and (this is hard to write with a straight face) “Western values,” including the suppression of religious dissidents. This led to the fundamentalist Muslim backlash, with Mid-East Muslims widely interpreting American intervention and support for the Shah as both imperialistic and anti-Islamic, setting up the current “clash of civilizations” . . . in which neither side ends up looking good.

It’s interesting to note that much of the secrecy about the event not only covered up American crimes, but British ones.

America’s foreign policy seems so un-American. In so many ways.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.