Category: too much government

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free trade & free markets too much government

The Zero Effect

The idea of hiking the legal minimum wage just doesn’t go away, alas.

The usual thought experiment those with common sense use to elicit a modicum of sagacity in the minimum wage advocates’ addled synapses runs like this: You say you want a higher minimum wage, say $9 per hour. Why not $49 — or $490.00?

Every sensible person knows that wouldn’t work; you can’t simply force all wages up without dire consequences in lost jobs, businesses. But it’s a way to impart some sense of why prices are what they are, how supply and demand work.

But there’s another tactic: Make the counter-offer. “I want to help low-skilled workers find jobs. Set the minimum wage to $0!” Then ask:

Would people work for zero dollars?

Would all wages fall to nothing?

You’ll get a few absurd answers, but the logic should sink in, eventually: High-wage jobs are there not due to Santa Claus employers, but because of worker productivity.

With no minimum wage, there would be more low-wage jobs available, sure. And some of the jobs at the current minimum may indeed go down in pay, but there would be a lot more employment.

And no 5¢ an hour jobs for the same reason no one but interns today work for zero dollars. It wouldn’t be worth it, wouldn’t even cover the costs of getting to work. Folks do have other options: Keep looking; sponge off relatives; beg, borrow, steal; scrounge. Sell things on eBay.

That’s why now people reject some jobs.

Let others protest low wages. The rest of us should protest low productivity.

And a lack of common sense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Saving You from Low Prices

Would you be upset if you had to pay “too little” for a limo ride?

Me neither.

Nevertheless, the Hillsborough County Public Transportation Commission requires limo drivers to charge a minimum of $50 per ride, no matter how brief the ride may be. In 2001, Florida lawmakers foolishly empowered the Tampa-area Commission to set minimum fares. These began at $40 for limo rides, then rose to $50.

The purpose is to protect established firms from competition. “That’s why taxi companies love it — because it protects taxi companies,” says Justin Pearson, executive director of the Florida chapter of the Institute for Justice, the valiant libertarian law firm. “Large taxi and limousine companies have divvied up customers.”

Dave Shaw, president of West Florida Livery Associate, admits that taxi and limo companies backed the $50 minimum. That way, “there wouldn’t be any issues where limousines were charging the same amount as taxi cabs.” Of course, the mere desire to see certain prices prevail, low or high, does not imply any entitlement to see those prices imposed by force.

The Institute for Justice has sued on behalf of limousine business owner Thomas Halsnik and two limo customers. IJ argues that the Commission’s mandatory minimum violates the right of customers to bargain and the right of owners to make a living. “The government shouldn’t make it a crime for businesses to give customers a good deal merely to protect politically powerful insiders from competition.”

Exactly. The government shouldn’t force us to pay more so the politically powerful can be unfairly protected from competition and enriched. But it too often does.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Protesting Gravity

The continuing, ramped-up protests of low wages at low-end service jobs, like McDonalds and (to some extent) Walmart, put many of us in a bind. On the one hand, a decent person wants others to be happy in their work, and paid well. On the other, a wise person wants those others to face reality.

It does no good to protest the law of gravity, or blame nature for your limited skill set. We work with what we have, apply our intelligence and industry from our baseline situations. We adapt.

How?

Produce more of what someone else is willing to pay for. That’s how (some) other people earn more than $7.50 an hour. Or $17.50 an hour. Or $175.00 an hour. McDonalds doesn’t pay high wages. But there are many companies that do. Even in the restaurant biz there are better-paid burger-flippers — those burgers are priced higher (and taste better, and are served in posher places) thus allowing the purveyors of said hamburgers to afford the higher wages.

What do protestors really expect? If their wages go up, either their employers fire some workers and switch to automation (thus cutting costs) or up go the prices.

But if prices rise, who buys the burgers that pay for McDonalds’ workers’ wages? I’ll buy a McDonalds burger for a buck, or a premium burger for five bucks. But jack up the prices, and I go elsewhere.

Protesting low wages? Might as well protest gravity.

Or, since the economy’s in such a slump that folks would rather gripe than look for more productive jobs — which are, after all, unnaturally scarce — protest Obama.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Prosecution Magnet

Buckyballs are little round magnets that can be sculpted into intricate geometrical patterns, providing responsible adults good clean fun.

Though marketed to adults, and despite the company’s extensive informational systems to discourage their use by unsupervised children, Buckyballs were indeed ingested by a few kids, alas. The ultimate misuse.

Even if you haven’t read those few horror stories — thankfully, no deaths have been reported, something you can’t say for drape drawstrings, tricycles, and bathtubs — you can probably imagine the huge havoc little magnets can wreak in little intestines.

Perhaps you might think it is up to parents to keep such adult playthings out of reach of toddlers and ultra-foolish older children, but this is America — and this is the age of regulation and loose liability lawyering.

So of course they were banned, and the company that made them, Maxfield and Oberton, folded.

There is a long story behind the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s ban on Buckyballs. One could use it to limn the strange world of modern American product liability and business regulation. But it’s not the only story. As Ari Armstrong put it,

Now, not satisfied with destroying Maxfield and Oberton, the CPSC is seeking to destroy the company’s former CEO, Craig Zucker — who led a spirited although ultimately unsuccessful public campaign against the CPSC’s actions.

Zucker’s “Save Our Balls” campaign was, he said, a success, “but not successful enough to save the company.” Apparently it really ticked off folks at the CPSC, for the agency, against its own legal authorization, continues to prosecute Zucker personally.

Zucker fears this personal vendetta “is just the beginning.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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too much government

Mugged by Obamacare

Sometimes people rush to support the destruction of their freedom (and that of others), then become shocked to learn how destructive such destruction can be.

Businessman and “left-leaning activist” Link Christensen, former advocate of Obamacare, once cheered this sweeping assault on what remains of our medical freedom because “it sounded like a good idea to offer insurance to all the people in the country.”

Perhaps he didn’t realize what kind of “offers” get foisted on us by government force. Anyway, his enthusiasm has now waned. Christensen and his employees currently pay about $60 a month for insurance coverage. But this insurance does not satisfy Obamacare’s mandates. To switch to a compliant program, they’ll have to fork over at least twice as much.

“It’s not going to be any type of bargain for people who work for me,” Christensen observes. “I’m concerned that my employees and others in that socioeconomic background are going to be left without any coverage. . . .”

Not the way things were supposed to be! What happened to the promised paradise?

Yet the higher costs, shrinking alternatives, and other baleful effects of Obamacare and of government interventionism generally are predictable. Perhaps Mr. Christensen and others inclined to leap before they look when it comes to government nostrums can now try the reverse. Perhaps they can think twice the next time somebody flourishes a pair of handcuffs and says “Here, put these on, it’ll help people.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling too much government

Choosing Choice

Public schools often get lousy report cards.

One big reason is that under the bureaucratically run government monopoly, teachers and administrators have no freedom to try fundamentally different approaches and be rewarded by consumers when they get it right. Educators must obey uniform and stifling standards.

Alas, too many of these public-school staffers are far from eager to shuck the mandatory mediocrity. They’re more worried about keeping their jobs and keeping captive their mis-taught and under-taught students. Such educrats oppose all policies — tax credits, vouchers, more autonomy for charter schools — that help students escape failing classrooms.

The educrats’ prejudice against educational freedom is being abetted by Obama’s “Justice” Department, suing to block school-choice policies in Louisiana on “civil rights” grounds. Obviously, no “civil right” is violated merely because a student attends a private school. But Obama’s lawyers want to make the issue about race regardless. Something about how it’s harder to maintain racial balance if too many children of a particular race leave public schools . . . even if fostering school choice makes it easier for all kids of whatever race to do so.

By Justice’s bogus standard of “justice,” then, actual justice — indeed, actual freedom and opportunity, even actual quality of education — must be shoved aside as irrelevant. What matters is only “racial balance,” no matter the injury to any student’s rights or well-being.

But preserving the jobs of educrats and preserving somebody’s idea of ideal demographics are not the purpose of going to school. The purpose is to learn.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

Heap Bad Medicine

Could medical insurance — insurance for “health care” — itself act like a drug?

Are we addicts?

Third-party (“insurance”) payments sure are super-convenient. But their convenience comes at a cost: insurance (and other third-party payers) that remunerate doctors and hospitals directly is what’s driving much of the price inflation in this sector.

Automobile insurance policies overwhelmingly pay the insured, not the mechanics, and we have no automobile repair crisis.

This was related with utmost clarity by Jeffrey A. Singer in his recent Wall Street Journal commentary “The Man Who Was Treated for $17,000 Less.” A patient got an astoundingly better price for a surgery by simply setting aside his insurance program and paying in cash. Singer explains why:

  1. “Hospitals and other providers make their ‘list’ prices as high as possible when negotiating contracts with health plans and Medicare regulators. No one is ever expected to pay the list price.”
  2. “[M]ost people these days don’t have health ‘insurance.’ They have prepaid health plans. They pay premiums to take advantage of a pre-negotiated fee schedule arranged for and administered by a third party.”
  3. “It is the third-party payment system that interferes with true price competition, so ‘market clearing prices’ can’t develop.”

Singer reminds us that specialty services like Lasik eye surgery, which tend not to be covered by insurance policies, have improved in quality and gone down in price.

Alas, as he laments, the United States is “headed in the exact opposite direction” from a real, cost-reducing solution. To a nation addicted to third-party payers in medicine, Obamacare is nothing more than upping the dose of the same old drug.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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.

Categories
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.

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies too much government

The Tyrants’ M.O.

Somewhere, recently, I saw the Lord Acton maxim about power (how it corrupts, and, if absolute, corrupts absolutely) referred to as a “cliché.”

Just because a phrase is common doesn’t mean it’s cheapened by repetition. Some expressed truths are that profound.

If anything, we need to repeat the Acton Axiom more often, and louder. For we live in a time when the federal government usurps power, denigrates, evades and undermines the rule of law, and appears “hell bent” (now that’s a cliché) on accumulating power in concentrated form . . . you know, like Sauron did with the ring of power in The Lord of the Rings. (Another possible cliché, eh?)

The NSA spying program story, as it unfolds, exemplifies the typical pattern:

  1. Information gets leaked.
  2. The government denies it.
  3. Further information comes out, establishing the lying nature of the denial and
  4. Adding more details of even more shocking nature.
  5. The government makes further denials . . .

And repeat ad nauseam.

Retired Lieutenant General James R. Clapper still serves the president as Director of National Intelligence, even after lying directly to Congress about the existence of NSA “metadata” collection system.

Meanwhile, the long arm of the secrecy establishment has retaliated against journalist Glenn Greenwald (who helped break Snowden’s first and subsequent leaks) by detaining the journalist’s partner without charge for the legal maximum of nine hours in Great Britain, upon coming home from a trip.

And the gentleman I reported on last week, who shut down his encrypted email service and erased his records rather than fork it all over to the government, says he has been repeatedly threatened with imprisonment.

Typical modus operandi of tyrant wannabes. Don’t worry about “cliché”; worry about tyranny.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.