Free markets may be an American ideal, but they aren’t an American reality:
Category: free trade & free markets
Black Friday’s mass anti-WalMart protests focused on how poorly WalMart treats its employees. Or so run the allegations. A typical sign said “Living Wage NOW.”
But it was a funny sort of labor-relations protest. There were marchers. And there was media coverage. Lots.
What there wasn’t a lot of, though? Walk-out WalMart employees. A few hundred showed up, nationwide, says OUR WalMart, the protesting organization; WalMart itself puts the walkout number at about 50.
That’s out of 1.4 million workers overall.
The whole spectacle seems so strange. It’s not the workers protesting wage and conditions, really, but those who don’t work there. The protestors demand higher wages for WalMart employees. But from what I can tell, actual employees feel rather lucky to have their jobs.
Could we be witnessing a new form of unionizing? Outside agitators working to get in? That is, could the protestors be trying to force up wages so that they could replace current WalMart workers?
For many of the most vocal WalMart critics, that seems unlikely. They hate WalMart. One gets the idea, from following their typical spiels, that what they are really up to is hurting the company.
And, if the folks at Reason magazine are right, raising prices. What many object to is the fact that WalMart has succeeded precisely because it has decreased prices to consumers.
In olden days, the common presumption was that cheaper prices were what we wanted from business: more goods for less, thus providing betterment to vastly increasing numbers of people.
On the professional left, such eternal verities no longer seem to apply.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Two court cases come to our attention, courtesy of Cato’s Ilya Shapiro. Both involve the favoring of members of one group over another.
The Sixth Circuit ruled that a voter-approved amendment to the Michigan state constitution outlawing racial preferences in college admissions would violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. The amendment states in part that Michigan public colleges and universities shall “not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. . . .”
In his dissent, Judge Richard Griffin writes: “The post-Civil War amendment that guarantees equal protection to persons of all races has now been construed as barring a state from prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race.” Shapiro calls the decision Orwellian.
The other case involves California law banning sellers of eyewear who are not state-licensed optometrists and ophthalmologists from conducting eye exams and selling glasses at the same place of business. The law prevents national eyewear chains from competing effectively in California (since customers prefer to get their glasses and eye exams in one shop).
Cato joins an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take up the California case. Shapiro also says that because there are two conflicting lower-court decisions on the Michigan question, the Supreme Court is likely to add that case to its docket.
Let’s hope all further rulings are based on a clear-sighted respect for equal rights under the law.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
When the local government of Washington, D.C., says, “Don’t worry” — people worry.
Matthew Marcou, deputy associate director of the District of Columbia’s Department of Transportation’s Public Space Regulation Administration, told those ruled by his long-worded administrative agency — the people working the city’s many food trucks, which feed lunch to a great number of Washingtonians and tourists on sidewalks every day — not to worry.
Just because the wording of a new sidewalk regulation would shut down eight of the city’s ten most popular food trucks doesn’t mean the good folks at the Public Space Regulation Administration couldn’t simply — almost magically — grant a waiver.
Be happy.
Still, there are the malcontents, the businesspeople who want some sort of certainty about the rules controlling their enterprise. The Washington Post reports that “Owners of food trucks . . . are put off by a still-unknown process that relies on the kindness of bureaucrats to keep their businesses alive.”
Che Ruddell-Tabisola is the D.C. Food Truck Association’s executive director and also a co-owner of the BBQ Bus. “[W]hy would you put forward regulations that are only successful when you make an exception to the rule?” asked Che.
The word “regulate” comes from the word “regular”; the goal of regulation being to make things regular. Therefore, regulations that require significant use of waivers fail. They aren’t rules at all. They constitute, instead, a labyrinth of economically suffocating and graft-inducing red tape.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
A storm hits the east coast. Some homes are washed away. Others burn down. Millions lose power. Gasoline supplies are massively disrupted, even as mass transit is unusable for days.
Obviously, post-Hurricane Sandy, emergency measures are called for. It’s crucial, for instance, that the disrupted and reduced supplies of gasoline be gotten into the tanks of vehicles as inefficiently as possible, and by causing motorists to waste as much of their precious time as possible. Who but rational and well-informed persons could disagree?
To achieve this goal, rationing and laws against “price gouging” — in New Jersey, defined as adding more than ten percent to prices under normal conditions of supply and demand — come to the rescue! So Governor Chris Christie assures gas station owners that his government will “impose the strictest penalties on profiteers who . . . seek to capitalize on the misfortune of others in the midst of a crisis. . . .”
After all, what’s the alternative?
Well, it’s this: Let fuel prices rise to the height required to induce motorists who least urgently demand gas to give way to those who most urgently demand it. This would
- shrink or prevent round-the-block gas lines;
- encourage shipment of gas to those areas where prices have risen the highest, i.e., where gasoline is scarcest;
- allow people to get back on their feet as quickly as possible by following their own best judgment in the face of local circumstances best known to themselves.
What do you call this strategy? Getting out of the way. Or laissez faire — but there’s nothing foreign about it. It used to be the American way.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The practice of medicine historically straddled between being a business profession and a charitable endeavor. When government took it over — nearly in one big gulp, in Great Britain— that uneasy mix mutated, leaving us with the occasional bout of stark horror.
A British woman suffering from cystic fibrosis has been denied a new wonder drug that the manufacturer has agreed to provide for free, while the National Health Service gets around to approving it. But NHS says no.
Her family say she will die soon without it, yet managers at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham say it would be unethical to provide the drug under the deal, only for it to be withdrawn later.
The drug, Kalydeco also known as ivacaftor, costs £182,000 per patient per year, and works for five per cent of people with CF who have a certain defective gene, around 270 people in England.
It corrects a malfunctioning protein which causes the characteristic build-up of fluid and mucus in the lungs that causes devastating damage.
A long shot, apparently. But is that any reason to deny a charitable offer?
These kinds of deals get offered and accepted in America all the time.
But then, when a private insurance company here decides not to cover some drug or treatment, that’s an excuse to excoriate American capitalism — while forgetting about all the characteristically American workarounds. But in “single-payer” Britain we see the state acting as a proverbial “death panel.” The outcry against socialism should be just as loud, if not louder.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
A new website, Marijuana Majority, makes an impression by listing famous people who think America’s laws against marijuana are crazy, unjust, or at least not very wise.
The site is elegant; it presents a long list. And by offering statements from each celebrity, we get a few ideas beyond the “marijuana should be legalized [to some degree]” message. Lawrence O’Donnell makes something close to an actual argument:
Since Gallup starting asking Americans if marijuana should be legal back in 1969, most have always said no — until now. In a Gallup poll released yesterday, 50 percent said pot use should be legalized. . . . A minority of 46 percent continue to say marijuana should not be legalized. . . . In a democracy we should expect such a dramatic shift in public opinion to be reflected in our public officials.
Evangelist Pat Robertson offers the practical point, often iterated:
I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol. I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.
A lot of folks, including British entrepreneur Richard Branson, enthuse about the taxing possibilities:
[I]t’s currently estimated that the annual revenue that would be raised in California if it taxed and regulated the sale of marijuana would be $1,400,000,000!
But this is not primarily a propaganda-by-the-word site, it’s a propaganda-by-the-celebrity site. Alas, the bulk of celebrities hail from the entertainment industry . . . not the most convincing bunch on the whole.
Still, the barrage of support and ideas is impressive, showing you don’t have to be a stoner to want to liberalize marijuana laws.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Ah, Minnesota. The home of “nice” Big Government. And in keeping with that, last week the state produced a grand example of mindlessly intrusive regulation. That’s the “Big Government” part. The “nice” part is how quickly the government conceded it was wrong.
I read about it first at Reason’s Hit & Run, where Katherine Mangu-Ward proclaimed “Minnesota Bans Free Online College Courses from Coursera. I Give Up.” She briefly related the burgeoning online industry of offering college course lectures free to the public (minus the accreditation), and how one of them was singled out for prohibition from the state’s Office of Higher Education: “Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there.”
Ms. Mangu-Ward’s conclusion was simple:
Idiots.
A day later, however, the story had radically changed. Minnesota’s bureaucrats had rethought their position, as related by this particular bureau’s bigwig, Larry Pogemiller: “Obviously, our office encourages lifelong learning and wants Minnesotans to take advantage of educational materials available on the Internet, particularly if they’re free.”
Obviously.
Pogemiller went on to promise that, when the legislature “convenes in January, my intent is to work with the Governor and Legislature to appropriately update the statute to meet modern-day circumstances.”
The regulators of Minnesota’s higher education proved that they could learn a new lesson. How well? We’ll see, as online schooling continues to gain its foothold — and accreditation, too.
Gerard Piel famously wrote of the “acceleration of history.” With the Internet, we see the feedback time from bad policy to removal of said policy cut down to a mere day.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Logic and evidence? Or bullying and intimidation?
A member of a local Pennsylvania teachers union has demanded the resignation of the vice president of the West Chester Area School Board, Heidi Adsett, for suggesting in a letter to the editor that, instead of threatening to strike, teachers unsatisfied with hefty compensation packages try their luck elsewhere.
Adsett had also said that Pennsylvania should ban teacher strikes.
The member of the West Chester Education Association spoke up at the school board meeting after the letter had been published, objecting to Adsett’s statement on the grounds that it expressed “publicly venomous animosity [against] our teachers,” and clashed with support for public education. Other union members applauded. Others professed confusion about whether Adsett was speaking officially for the whole board.
In his report on the fracas, Ben Velderman quotes the president of Stop Teacher Strikes, Simon Campbell, who observes that congressmen “are interviewed all the time. None of them say, ‘Well, I want to make it clear that I’m not representing the whole of Congress.’”
Union defenders “can’t argue the facts,” says Adsett, “so they have to try and argue by bullying and intimidation.”
Whether public employees should be permitted to strike is debatable. Were education privately run and unions not free to bully persons crossing picket lines, then parents, taxpayers and schools wouldn’t have to worry about being pushed into paying teachers far above market rates. But that’s not the current situation. We have public schools, and our democratically elected school board members should be just as free to speak — to debate — as voters are.
Democracy, after all, requires free speech. And public education, for all its problems, surely doesn’t require democracy’s suppression.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The two major presidential candidates, incumbent Obama and challenger Romney, must spend their final weeks of the campaign appealing to
- Members of their respective parties disappointed enough to stay home on election day — or vote the dreaded “Third Party” ticket;
- Independent voters apt to find something distasteful about both candidates;
- The apathetic and the uninformed.
How to appeal to all three groups simultaneously? Well, go for the old standby: fear and hatred of foreigners.
This year, it’s the Chinese.
Romney started the China-bashing by calling our Chinese trading partners “cheaters.” Apparently he is much vexed about how the Chinese don’t respect established intellectual property rights, “stealing” our technology, “everything from computers to fighter jets.” Of course, this mainly happens after “we” set up manufacturing plants for that technology there. He charged that President Obama has not deigned to “stand up to China.”
Earlier, he had accused China of manipulating its money in its favor. He seems to have dropped that, perhaps out of embarrassment — our own Fed’s monetary manipulations, after all, dwarf China’s.
The Obama campaign responded by avoiding the intellectual property issue just as Romney now avoids the monetary one, calling Romney himself a “cheater.” You see, in his Bain Capital days, Romney invested in firms that relocated jobs to “low wage countries like China.” Romney, we are told, has “never stood up to China.”
By which is meant: Romney engaged in globalism and opposed protectionism.
Is Mr. Obama really suggesting that prosperity will come if we shrink from global competition and enact barriers to international trade in goods and services?
The biggest problem the U.S. economy faces isn’t Beijing; it’s Washington.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.