He who thinketh he leadeth and hath no one following him is only taking a walk.
Anonymous
Rant of the Day: Phil Coelho and Jim McClure on the Minimum Wage
HT Don Boudreaux
Minimum wages are extraordinarily damaging to the most disadvantaged of society — the physically and mentally handicapped, the poorly educated, the young and unskilled and those with checkered histories that make them questionable employees. The road to perdition is paved with both good intentions and ignorance; the economics profession has been willful in its ignorance by concentrating on the marginal consequences of increasing minimum wages rather than emphasizing the continuing harm that minimum wages create.
Starbucks’ Howard Schultz and other men of good will unthinkingly embrace the belief that higher living standards can be legislated by simply putting floors on wages. This does not create prosperity; it creates poverty and misery. Even worse, the damages it does are concentrated upon society’s most vulnerable. This is a sin.
Chart of the Day
 |
| Via Mises.org |
 |
| Via the Milton Friedman group on FB |
 |
| Via Lew Rockwell #sarcasm |
Rhode Island Supreme Court Strikes a Blow Against Freedom of Conscience: Thumbs DOWN!
Somewhat over a decade ago, a couple of Catholic firefighters, over their religious objections, were ordered by their Providence managers to drive a firetruck in a Gay Pride parade. The judges paid short shrift to the religious liberty issue and considered the patently political nature of event participation to be a legitimate work task.
Geraghty's Rant on the Police Disrespecting de Blasio At Public Events: Thumbs DOWN!
I have little tolerance for the public displays of disrespect by professionals; as a military brat and a former officer myself, I knew to control my emotions and maintain a professional demeanor, even when I had to defer to superior officers who were jerks; I did so to respect military protocol. I'm sure other military veterans have had similar experiences; turning our backs would have been prosecuted by the military.
Over the weekend, I republished a comment I think I made in a Drudge thread on the police reaction to a de Blasio appearance; many Drudge threads result in hundreds of comments which would take several minutes to scan, but I did seem to me to me that I was the only recent commenter taking exception to the collective demonstration of officer disrespect for the mayor.
When I got this morning's Morning Jolt email from Geraghty, I halfway wondered if he was responding to my Drudge comment when I read his title: "Just What Is the ‘Appropriate’ Way for Police to React to Mayor de Blasio?" It seems to be clearly mocking those of us who believe what the police did was inappropriate, but if you read the piece, he was referring to recent comments by well-known New Yorkers:
NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, Sunday:The reader can read the columnist's rant: basically, his point of view is that you should cut the cops a lot of slack in terms of how they process their grief in the loss of colleagues, and he tries to blame de Blasio for what he believes were accusations of racism in the NYPD in comments following the Garner homicide, unduly disrespectful and triggering a reciprocal response.
NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said it was “very inappropriate” for police officers to turn their backs to video screens showing Mayor Bill de Blasio speaking at an officer’s funeral Saturday.Rudy Giuliani, Sunday:
Giuliani said, “The mayor is not in any way to be treated with people turning their backs. It doesn’t matter whether you like the mayor or you don’t like the mayor, you have to respect the mayor’s position.”
No, Jim, I'm not buying your pathetically weak excuses for unprofessional behavior by the cops. If and when the mayor appears on behalf of all the citizens of New York City to pay tribute to an officer slain on duty, what the police should do is listen to him respectfully, not use a solemn occasion to play politics. They don't have to like de Blasio (whom I despise as a pathetic incompetent "progressive") but they should model professional behavior and not react disagreeably, hold their tongue; there's a time and place to exercise one's personal opinion--it's not at a public event.
I've become more and more disenchanted with most recent National Review threads; there are occasional voices of reason, like Delgado:
Imagine if I were to tell you there is a large group of government employees, with generous salaries and ridiculously cushy retirement pensions covered by the taxpayer, who enjoy incredible job security and are rarely held accountable even for activities that would almost certainly earn the rest of us prison time. When there is proven misconduct, these government employees are merely reassigned and are rarely dismissed. The bill for any legal settlements concerning their errors? It, too, is covered by the taxpayers. Their unions are among the strongest in the country. No, I’m not talking about public-school teachers.I’m talking about the police.It's gotten to the point that my patience and civility is sorely tested by any cop apologist who refuses to concede that in this constitutional system the cop is not the judge, jury, and executioner; his job is to ensure the suspect has his day in court. In no case is it necessary or reasonable to render a citizen unconscious over an allegation of selling loose cigarettes. I'm sick and tired of people trying to blame the victim's health for Garner's death, when there would have been no death without using unnecessary tactics that anyone with a modicum of common sense would know put an obese man's life at risk.What may be even worse is a half dozen cops standing around and watching a fellow cop kill a citizen, the blue wall of silence, putting the brotherhood over constitutional duties to serve and protect.
For decades, conservatives have served as stalwart defenders of police forces. But it’s time for conservatives’ unconditional love affair with the police to end; respecting good police work means being willing to speak out against civil-liberties-breaking thugs who shrug their shoulders after brutalizing citizens.
On Thursday in Staten Island, an asthmatic 43-year-old father of six, Eric Garner, died after a group of policemen descended on him, placing him in a chokehold while attempting to arrest him for allegedly selling cigarettes. A bystander managed to capture video in which Garner clearly cries out, “I can’t breathe!” Even after releasing the chokehold (chokeholds, incidentally, are prohibited by NYPD protocol), the same officer then proceeds to shove and hold Garner’s face against the ground, applying his body weight and pressure on Garner, ignoring Garner’s pleas that he cannot breathe. Worse yet, new video shows at least eight officers standing around Garner’s lifeless, unconscious body.
Reason's Nanny of the Year 2014
Facebook Corner
(Reason). According to the latest poll data, Jeb Bush is now the preferred Republican presidential candidate. Despair, ye foes of monarchy.
As a pro-liberty conservative Catholic who, along with Tom Woods and others, has had no problem disagreeing with Pope Francis' economic illiterate views in his recent exhortation, I am somewhat amused this pseudo-issue, reflecting a totally bigoted and shallow anti-Catholicism, continues to resurface. Four of my younger siblings married non-Catholics, and three of those in-laws have converted to Catholicism over the tenure of their marriages (and the other sibling's 6 children have been raised Catholic). Latinos, like Franco-Americans, identify strongly with the Catholic faith, and Jeb Bush's wife is a Latina.
The Church's teachings and authority are strictly limited to matters of faith and morals and do not extend to politics. In fact, 5 of the SCOTUS justices are Roman Catholic, and despite unambiguous Church teachings against elective abortion and for indissoluble traditional marriage between a man and a woman, this hasn't resulted in SCOTUS rulings consistent with Church teachings.
How many times are we going to go through this nonsense on the Presidential stage? John Kerry in 2004 was Catholic, Vice President Joe Biden is Catholic, and two of the 2012 contenders, Gingrich (a convert) and Santorum were also Catholic, and Mitt Romney had to face similar questions over LDS. Doesn't Reason have better things to do than beat a dead horse?
(IPI). Any welfare system should promote earned success instead of forced dependency.
IPI is right to focus on the principle of Subsidiarity. I would liked to hear more about the tactics to ensure a positive benefit to the recipient who betters himself from a job/career/earnings perspective. E.g., earned income tax credits, certain subsidies, etc.
(Reason). This is why libertarians and conservatives clash over the meaning of the Constitution.
Because conservatives have been corrupted by the Christian Right and neoconservatism.
Nonsense. This is the kind of intellectually shallow analysis I've come to expect from bumper sticker libertarians, i.e., "fiscal conservative, social liberal".
A lot of it has to do with a conservative's aversion to radical change from the status quo. About 20 years ago, I worked under a company VP who eventually ran to replace a retiring GOP Congressman in the Chicago suburbs. His signature position was saving social security. In part, conservatives dislike the chaos of revolt, like Burke unnerved by the French revolution.
(Cato Institute). "Just because the federal government enacts a law against marijuana, it does not follow that all the states have to enact laws against marijuana. And just because the federal police (FBI and DEA) have grown accustomed to having state and local police conduct marijuana raids and arrests, it does not follow that the local authorities can’t stop doing that. So long as the local police are not arresting or threatening to arrest federal agents for trying to enforce the federal law, there is no “conflict.” Thus, the Supremacy Clause does not come into play."
I've given up trying to understand judicial leaps of logic, e.g., in the 1942 Filburn case, where a small farmer's consumption of his own wheat harvest constituted an act of interstate commerce and hence under the reach of federal law.
If we go back to the sheer judicial madness in deciding the Carolene Products case, let us recall the context. The whole purpose of the interstate commerce clause, the inability of states to enact tariffs, etc. was to promote a free market among states. Carolene Products sold a canned filled milk product. Big Dairy disliked the competition, fear-mongered over the "unnatural" product, and prevailed upon Congress to ban its shipment across state lines. Carolene Products could continue to sell in its plant-based states under traditional state regulatory authority, although obviously the prohibition clearly violated free market principles in doing business across state lines. SCOTUS infamously rejected Carolene Products' appeal, essentially giving the tyranny of the Congressional majority broad discretion under the worst footnote in human history, Footnote 4.
Note that Congress didn't try to ban the production of filled milk (which obviously Big Dairy would have preferred). (And, of course, we still had the possibility of Big Dairy trying to influence state legislatures to ban filled milk.) But traditionally regulation of commerce in the state came under state sovereignty, e.g., Nebraska wouldn't have the right to sue a neighboring state to enforce its legal preferences of goods or serviced produced. In theory, the federal government's authority should only come into play in terms of regulating distribution of marijuana products across state lines. (One could anticipate the Statist objection: if, after all, the federal government was allowed to set wheat quotas for farmers, a manifest violation of economic liberty, relevant in the Filburn case, why couldn't they set a quota of zero for the marijuana market?)
Political Cartoon
 |
| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: Christmas 2014
Mannheim Steamroller, "Deck the Hall"
