Things don't go wrong and break your heart
so you can become bitter and give up.
They happen to break you down and build you up
so you can be all that you were intended to be.
Samuel Johnson
The Cutest Mayor in America
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| Meet 4-year-old Robert “Bobby” Tufts, reelected to a second term. Who needs Filner or Weiner? |
I have hinted at the fact that I've been working on one-off posts. I believe length-wise this one-off post may be the longest in the history of the blog. Asking me whether I'll do something like this would be like a husband asking his wife 5 minutes after birth when they can start on the next one. It took a lot of work to work through this: it's like trying to have a half dozen arguments all at the same time. There are a couple of spots I made similar points (because I wrote this over days--and I sometimes had less time to work on my daily miscellany posts). Not sure how many pageviews it will get--I know some readers will be put off by its length, and some of the criticisms will be familiar to readers. This one was especially tough because I don't like writing about Zimmerman or race issues; I have one more one-off on a related theme, and hopefully that will be the end of the subject for a while...
Sheldon Richmond on the Government Hurdles to Employment
I may not be the first libertarian to use the organizer/metaphor, but I'm not aware of others. We can conceptualize economic transactions as a stretch of track between supplier and consumer. Government policies are like hurdles placed along the track. Some competitors trip on hurdles (which could be any number of things, like permits or licenses, zoning restrictions, and mandated costs/benefits)
Over the past week, there have been 24-hour strikes for low-wage fast-food workers, aiming essentially to double pay. We already know from the supply/demand curve there would be less demand for labor at a higher price (HINT: this would make alternatives to low-skill labor, such as technology, more feasible). Given a highly competitive industry which focuses on low-cost food and has to cope with spikes in commodities, profit margins can be less than 10%. The bottom line is a more robust economy would likely improve the market for fast food and demand/ competition for workers. In a weak economy like we have, minimum wages obfuscate the (lower) clearing wage. This actually hurts the bargaining position of a fast food worker because some applicants, willing to settle for lower wages, would jump at the chance to replace him or her. Fast food companies have an incentive to pay workers as their productivity merits.
Richmond has a nice summary on examples of how government hampers prospective workers, which I'll list in bullet form:
- Occupational licensing restricts entry into many kinds of work by raising the cost of going into business.
- Zoning restrictions prevent people from using their homes for commercial purposes.
- Restrictions on street vendors and cabbies quash small-scale entrepreneurship.
- Intellectual-property law inhibits or harasses those whose products might be construed as violating patents or copyrights.
- Government land holdings make land artificially more costly.
- Taxes and regulations impose greater burdens on would-be entrepreneurs than on large, established businesses.
I think I've been reading too much Bob Boudreaux. He's proud of the fact that he doesn't vote (I didn't even know there was such a thing as the League of Non-Voters). Part of it is,to be honest, I've had to hold my nose in voting for President each election in my lifetime. It's just Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama were so off-the-charts grossly unsuitable to be President, the GOP candidates won my vote almost by default. That doesn't mean I approved of everything they did or said--or what they did after winning my vote. For example, with Bush, I opposed the creation of DHS from the get-go; it was clear that the Administration hadn't thought through the post-Hussein era in Iraq, and he waited too long to make changes in manpower and strategy, it wasn't clear why he was moving first on social security or why he exacerbated the Medicare problem by adding an unpaid benefit. Don't get me started on the mad diplomatic dash to win Security Council votes on Iraq.
When we got to McCain, he made 2 bad decisions during the campaign that left me stupefied (although I was supporting McCain and softened my criticisms during the campaign): Sarah Palin was a horrendous choice (I recall thinking McCain would never select her because of Troopergate) and the decision to suspend his campaign during the TARP crisis. Palin did impress me with her first 2 speeches--but anyone can deliver a prepared speech. When I heard her first interview (ABC). I remember thinking, didn't the McCain campaign vet her? I also couldn't understand how it made sense for him to make an experience argument but then, at 70-years-old, choose a first-term governor with no federal experience as his VP.
Don't get me started on Romney: his notorious flip-flops, a 59-point economic plan, his poor positioning on foreign policy, how he handled RomneyCare/ObamaCare.
Now I read my favorite Congressman Amash called Snowden a whistleblower, not a traitor. I think some of what Snowden revealed was whistleblowing, but Snowden's overall activities were an unacceptable breach of the public trust.
All of this leads to Goldberg's essay on HIllaryMania which I think is spot on:
The simple fact, by my lights at least, is that Hillary Clinton is not a compelling personality in her own right. Hillary’s a very solid policy wonk, but the only thing that makes her a rock star is that people keep calling her one.
The same goes for her career. Quick: What has the woman done? As a lawyer, what important cases did she win? As a first lady, her only major “accomplishment” was a failed health-care-reform scheme that didn’t even get a vote in the Senate. As a carpetbagging senator from New York, what historic legislation did she shepherd? Most of her party, including the president, repudiates her vote for the Iraq War. Pretty much the only thing her biggest supporters can tout about her tenure as secretary of state is that she “traveled a million miles,” which strikes me as the ultimate triumph of quantity over quality (particularly given the hot mess that is American foreign policy).I don't have Hillary Derangement Syndrome. There is little doubt about her work ethic. But she's not a leader, and the mere sound of her voice to me is like fingernails over a chalkboard, not to mention she has the wrong position on almost any issue. She would never have won political office in the first place except for being the wife of #42. I think 2016 is a change election, and Clinton is part of the past, not the future.
I'm Done With Michelle Rhee
This is a clip I didn't see during last year's campaign:
While Rhee, who is a Democrat, agrees with Romney on school vouchers in some circumstances, she said she disagrees with his call and that of the GOP platform for local control of education “100 percent.”
“We had 14,000 school boards in this country making the decisions for a long time and that is why we ended up where we ended up,” Rhee said, noting that often school boards aren’t composed of educators. “I don’t think local folks know everything.”Rhee, the controversial reformer and former DC chancellor, endorsed Obama's federal primacy approach to education. She in her former position had the courage to take on the teacher unions, which was constructive and I've been a supporter of hers earlier in the blog. I knew she was a registered Democrat, so it didn't surprise me she supported Obama's approach (which I consider badly flawed but more tolerable than most of his domestic policies.)
But I oppose central planning and advocate the concept of federalism. I see market competition as critical for reforming lower education. The last quote in particular is appallingly condescending. Ask me which I hold responsible for mediocre classroom performance--school boards or the education profession: take a wild guess. To be honest, I want another set of eyes.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne and Townhall |
The Beatles, "A Day in the Life"
