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Category: Common Sense
Californian voters have largely reversed an assault on “gig” workers in that state by passing Proposition 22.
Prop 22 is a response to Assembly Bill 5, enacted in California in 2019. The idea was to reclassify many freelancers so that companies could no longer treat them as independent contractors. Instead, to keep giving them work, companies would have to convert erstwhile freelancers to regular employees.
Doing so would mean paying additional costs. Instead, many companies simply stopped working with California-based freelancers. Freelancers of all ideological stripes protested the new law.
Rideshare firms Uber and Lyft were a major target of the legislation. Cabbies who work with them are contractors, not employees. Because of AB5, Uber and Lyft have been on the verge of leaving California — meaning a “victory” only for unions and others who hate market competition.
Now these firms, and many freelancers, can apparently keep operating in the state.
Mission accomplished?
Not so fast. A national version of AB5 sits in Congress, lying in wait. It has been endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 215 Democratic co-sponsors, and Joe Biden, who may or may not be the next president of these not-so-United States. (Recounts are being conducted and allegations of election fraud are being investigated.)
If we end up with a President Biden, he may well push for a national version of AB5. Especially if the Democrats get at least 50 U.S. Senators after runoffs in Georgia are decided.
Stay vigilant. Protect our right to work.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Watch: Not the Change…
Paul Jacob about why Joe waits, China stalks, the WHO walks back, and more:
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James Mill
Every man should be considered as having a right to the character which he deserves; that is, to be spoken of according to his actions.
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F. Marion Crawford
So far as supply and demand are concerned, books in general and works of fiction in particular are commodities and subject to the same laws, statutory and traditional, as other articles of manufacture. A toy-dealer would not venture to sell real pistols to little boys as pop-guns, and a gun-maker who should try to sell the latter for army revolvers would get into trouble, even though he were able to prove that the toy was as expensive to manufacture as the real article, or more so, silver-mounted, chiselled, and lying in a Russia-leather case. I am not sure that the law might not support the purchaser in an action for damages if he discovered at a critical moment that his revolver was a plaything. It seems to me that there is a similar case in the matter of novels. A man buys what purports to be a work of fiction, a romance, a novel, a story of adventure, pays his money, takes his book home, prepares to enjoy it at his ease, and discovers that he has paid a dollar for somebody’s views on socialism, religion, or the divorce laws.
Francis Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893).
It’s “mobocracy” — the riots in major cities around the nation, but especially in Portland, Oregon, where the president sent federal agents. Local police had stood back for weeks as Democratic politicians — such as Joe Biden — referred to the rioters as “peaceful protesters.” Even as the mobs lit fires in the streets, defaced property, and attempted to break into government buildings.
Buck Sexton, writing at The Hill, makes the obvious linkage between the “anarchists” and the “Democratic” Party.
But Sexton doesn’t really answer the key questions: “Why are anarchists terrorizing Portland? What was the real purpose of the Seattle ‘Capital Hill Autonomous Zone’? Why were ‘Occupy City Hall’ protesters allowed to fight with police in lower Manhattan for a month, until officers cleared out their encampment on Wednesday?” Sexton rejects the official reasons give by the movements’ apparent leaders, but doesn’t go very far beyond Democratic Party attempts to leverage the riots.
Which may at least offer amusement. “The reason I am here tonight is to stand with you,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler assured the mob as he put on goggles. “So if they’re launching the tear gas against you, they’re launching the tear gas against me.” But that same night, his security detail “scuffled” with “protesters” and his own police department threatened to use tear gas and impact weapons on the incendiary horde.
Is this really about legitimate protest, as Biden insists?
Fighting federal fascism, as Democrats and many others insist?
Americans are all-in for criminal justice reform and the right to protest. Many, me included, have peacefully taken to the streets in recent weeks.
But there is nothing peaceful about assault, arson, property destruction.
And Democrats who aim to use the fracas to beat Trump in November may find that ‘playing with fire’ … burns.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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