Irony

Her name is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), a candidate for the House of Representatives.  Recall that Ocasio-Cortez is an ardent supporter of minimum wage laws, and as a start wants the minimum to be $15/hr.  New York City already has mandated that minimum wages in the city rise to $15/hr by the end of this year.

She went by her favorite coffee shop, The Coffee Shop in Union Square (which employs 150 folks), over the weekend to shoot the breeze because, she says, she used to work there. Then she discovered the place is closing this fall…because it can’t afford the rising labor costs on top of high rent and high regulation costs.

Editorial Decisions

Gerald Seib made one typical of the NLMSM in his Monday op-ed.  He opened his piece with this, and he went on from there.

Let’s imagine for a moment a parallel universe in which President Trump last week didn’t call a onetime top female aide a “dog….”

In that parallel universe, which of these other stories might have gotten more attention?

  • A Commerce Department report on booming sales in grocery stores, restaurants and department stores
  • The largest one-day rise in the stock market in four months
  • The approval by Mr Trump’s own Food and Drug Administration of a lifesaving generic version of the EpiPen injector device for allergic reactions
  • The resumption of trade talks with Chinese officials who increasingly appear shaken by the Trump administration’s tough actions.

Probably, all of them would have gotten more attention.

Let’s understand one thing very clearly. It’s entirely Seib’s editorial choice and that of his fellow journalists to talk about side issues instead of serious ones, matters like those in his list above that he’s confessed to freely ignoring in favor of tabloid claptrap. Blaming these editorial decisions on the man the NLMSM is so anxious to disparage is an illustration of the general dishonesty of the NLMSM.

Criticize or praise his policies to a journalist’s heart’s content—and there’s much to critique from both sides of his policies—that’s an op-ed journalist’s job.  Deciding to ignore those policies is not.

Oh, and one more thing.  For good or ill, Trump calls everyone “dog.” Seib and his fellow journalists are the only ones making a big deal about a particular person’s gender. His and their rank sexism stinks.

Interesting Graph

A recent Wall Street Journal article concerned the duration and potential durability of our current stock market bull run.  The bull has lasted

3,453 days since the S&P 500 hit its low of 666 on March 9, 2009. Since then, the broadest US blue-chip index has more than quadrupled in price terms….

What’s interesting to me, though, is this graph that was presented early in the piece.

Notice the gray line, which represents the Shanghai Composite Index.  The People’s Republic of China’s index representing the PRC’s stock market, such as it is, bottomed out some months earlier than did our market and those of Europe (Stoxx) and Japan (Nikkei)—and since then it has never really recovered, rising only slightly since that bottom.

It would seem (preaching to the choir, perhaps) that government manipulation of an economy doesn’t work very well—not even when it’s done by the smartest folks in the PRC room.

Drinking Coolaid

The NLMSM has done it.  In deep drafts.  And, no, I’m not writing about the recent collusion among NLMSM outlets one Sunday to write coordinated “opinion” anti-Trump pieces.

No, it’s even more blatant than that.  Here is an example of how deeply the NLMSM has drunk of ex-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s (D) coolaid that half of Americans are irredeemably deplorable racist, misogynistic, homophobes and ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) coolaid that we’re all just a bunch of bitter Bible-clinging gun-toters in flyover country.

MSNBC political analyst John Heilemann had this to say about those not on the Left and so too ignorant to agree with him:

I would like a pollster to test this question: how many people in the Republican Party think that it would be OK for Donald Trump to dissolve their own grandparents?

I’m virtually certain that if it was a Donald Trump–related question, you’ll get like 10% that would be like “Donald Trump has the power to do whatever he wants, including kill my parents.”

Heilemann claimed he was being hyperbolic to make a point about Trump loyalists, but you get the idea.

Free Stuff

In some places, that apparently includes free labor.  At least that’s Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro’s view.  He’s going to

raise wages by nearly 6,000% and…devalue the already-embattled currency by 96%….

Let me get this straight.  The bolívar fuerte (ironic name, that; it translates to “strong bolívar”) already is next door to worthless, Maduro is going to replace it with the sovereign bolivar that’s as much closer to worthless as he can get it (taking five(!) zeros off the face value of each piece of paper, which the sovereign bolivar does—the mechanism of the devaluation), and then he’s going to give workers even more of this useless “wage.”

I’m here to tell you, multiplying a nearly zero value by some number gives an answer that’s still right beside zero.  Maduro is expecting Venezuelans to work for nearly free, and he intends to make their pay even more worthless, so that they work even more nearly for free.

Such a drastic devaluation only fuels inflation: the supply of anything that can be bought is relatively fixed compared to demand, especially so in Venezuela, and making the currency used for purchase even less valuable only requires even higher prices to make the buys.  Throwing lots more money (of any value) at the supply only drastically potentiates the inflation.  The 1,000,000% [sic] inflation that Venezuela has for this year will look stable next year.

On the other hand, Maduro is reaching one of Communism’s two goals: eliminating money altogether and getting from each according to his ability.  Maduro does need to work a little harder on the needs goal, though.