the squad - ThisIsCommonSense.org

Money for Robots and Representatives!

Yesterday I addressed Senator Bernie Sanders’ minimum wage problem. Today it is member of Congress and “The Squad” Rashida Tlaib’s turn. She is unsatisfied with the just-passed national $15/hour minimum wage.

She wants to make it $20.

Now a bidding war begins?

But not where laborers bid for jobs. Instead, a war in which restaurateurs bid for robots.

The point being that when you force up the costs of employing one factor in a production process, those who are trying to make a living as producers do not just fold and give their wealth away to rent/purchase the newly exorbitant factor. They economize.

They make substitutions.

If I am not mistaken, basic economics has a term for the core concept … marginal something of something substitution.

Why folks enamored of government regulation and prohibition (for the minimum wage law prohibits hiring help below a certain rate of pay) seem to think this elementary aspect of human behavior can safely be ignored is hard to figure.

At Reason, Billy Binion explains just how devastating Tlaib’s “one size fits all approach” would be for restaurants, “particularly those of the mom and pop variety.” What Tlaib demands, for these wage contracts, “amounts to an increase of almost 940 percent.”

Binion cites one study predicting “that a median-rated restaurant on Yelp (3.5 stars) was 14 percent more likely to close with each additional dollar added to the tipped wage.”

If restaurants go out of business, new businesses would emerge, admittedly. Say, a return of the Automat!

While young folks look up that term, we oldsters wonder if these automation-minded entrepreneurs will fund Tlaib’s re-election campaign.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Rashida Tlaib, minimum wage, The Squad, economics,

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“I hesitate to contribute to this freak show,” Sen. John Kennedy (R‑La.) told Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night.

I know the feeling.

“I don’t think President Trump is a racist,” added the senator. “I don’t think his original tweet was racist.”

While I haven’t peered into the president’s soul, I didn’t see racism in his tweet, either. But I did catch a whiff of other wrongs.

Xenophobia, for instance.

And nastiness.

I didn’t like Mr. Trump’s attempt to paint “the Squad” — Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D‑Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.) — as somehow un-American or illegitimate by tweeting: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

All but Rep. Omar were born here, and immigrant Omar is just as much an American citizen as was George Washington.

“Our opposition to our socialist colleagues has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion, or with their race,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R‑Wyo.) rightly said. “It has to do with the content of their policies.”*

Let’s note that only two, AOC and Tlaib, have chosen the socialist label. Reps. Omar and Pressley have not, though their policy positions seem in sync.

It may be, as NBC News reporter Jonathan Allen wrote, that Trump’s tweet was designed to “flip the script,” ending the feud between the Squad and Speaker Pelosi, because “he wants the Democratic Party stuck to its progressive fringe.”

But the ends do not justify the means. Two wrongs don’t make a right. And our politics stinks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Cheney added (and I concur): “They are wrong when they pursue policies that would steal power from the American people and give that power to the government.”

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