Category Archives: regulation

Micromanaging

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A State government is reaching into the business decisions of private enterprise, presuming to dictate to State-domiciled businesses what their business decisions must be in an otherwise competitive labor market. Here’s Pennsylvania House of Representative Jennifer O’Mara (D, Delaware):

The Healthy Employee and Healthy Workplace Act will help Pennsylvania’s families by requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to their employees. Workers would be able to use paid sick leave to seek treatment for an illness or a family member’s illness, in addition to treatment related to domestic violence or sexual assault.

Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis at the Commonwealth Foundation offers one reason this is a counterproductive, if not outright idiotic, idea.

The real question is how to help the small percentage of workers that don’t have this benefit. The answer is more flexibility, not more regulation. For example, the federal Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employers to give hourly workers the choice of accumulating “comp time” in lieu of overtime pay[.]

The Progressive-Democrat O’Mara and her cohorts don’t care about such trivia. For Progressive-Democrats, it’s not about individual choice—us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted with making our own choices.

I offer another, more general objection, to the principle so plainly underlying O’Mara’s proposal. It’s about accruing personal and Party power in government and the ego trip of controlling other people’s lives and businesses.

There’s no need for this bill. That competitive labor market I mentioned will solve the matter. Just like “dental” and then health insurance became, in the competition for labor, a standard benefit and not a perk for the few.

Just like paid vacation became, in the competition for labor, a standard part of the worker’s pay package, and then grew from a few days to a week, to two weeks, and more. With accrual from year to year.

Just like paid sick leave became standard….

Now paid vacation and paid sick leave rapidly are becoming simply paid time off—adding the two original time blocks into a single time block with the same number of days that the two pay components separately had—with the worker no longer having to differentiate between the two because employers, if not Progressive-Democrats, trust their employees’ decisions.

Transparency in Schools

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Florida now has a significant measure of some.

As a part of the “Year of the Parent,” a commitment [Florida Governor Ron (R)] DeSantis has made to prioritize parental rights, DeSantis signed HB 1467, which includes several protections for parents, such as requiring school districts to allow parents to review all books in the school library, all required classroom book lists, and any instructional materials teachers use.

And

The new law requires school districts convening for the purpose of selecting instructional materials to post meeting notices and make them open to the public. They must also provide access to all materials at least 20 days prior to the school board taking official action on instructional materials, according to the new law. The Department of Education will also be required to publish a list of materials that have been removed or discontinued by school boards as a result of an objection and disseminate the list to school districts for their consideration.

Transparency—what a concept. We all still need, though, a resumption of the practice of parents occasionally sitting on a class their children are taking.

Tear It Down and Start Over

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It turns out the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control acted enthusiastically and frequently in the absence of data on the outcomes of its diktats guidelines. In particular, the CDC chose to act even though it lacked—and knew it lacked—

data on students’ learning loss when the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its COVID-19 school reopening guidance[.]

Even that early icon of medical sensibility, Anthony Fauci (of d National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases directorship and Wuhan Lab gain of function infamy) was warning the CDC of the uselessness of such things as six feet of separation requirements.

The CDC also was freely influenced by teachers union demands.

…NEA and the American Federations of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, influenced last-minute changes to the school guidance and received a copy before its public release.
The emails [at the link above] followed a New York Post report showing close coordination between the teachers unions and the CDC. APT [Americans for Public Trust] also obtained those emails through the Freedom of Information Act.
Before releasing the reopening guidance, the Biden administration considered teachers unions’ labor disputes

We need a function like that which the CDC used to serve, was designed to serve. The CDC no longer is that agency; it has become a science deficient, political, and union-influenced agency rather than a medical science advising agency, and it needs to be disbanded and dissolved, its personnel returned to the private sector.

A new facility needs to be set up in its place, with all new personnel, all drawn from the private sector—including the management team—all with practical, life-death, decision-making experience. No politicians, no dilettantes, no corporate executives need apply.

A Thought on Gasoline Production

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I had one. Take a breath.

California citizens pay a far higher price for a gallon of gasoline than even the average nation-wide: $5.79 against $4.29. Most of that difference comes from California’s State-unique regulations imposing, for instance, a low-carbon fuel standard and cap-and-trade taxes.

Separate from President Joe Biden’s (D) war on fossil fuel-sourced energy inflating the price of energy generally and gasoline in particular, that California price-inflating set of requirements also inflates the cost of gasoline nationally, since refiners are reluctant to produce separate kinds of gasoline for separate markets. Which brings me to my thought.

Refiners should produce a single type of gasoline related to carbon content, cap-and-trade taxes, and other froo-froo, based on the lower levels of regulatory interference in the rest of the nation, and sell that gasoline virtually nation-wide. Then they should offer to sell that single type to California buyers together with license(s) so those buyers can to modify the refiners’ product as they wish to bring that gasoline to within California desires.

In this way, drivers in the other 49 States would get a lower cost fuel from the refiners’ not having to impose some of that California cost on the rest of us, and the refiners would be able to recoup in the form of license fees most, if not all, of the putative costs of not selling directly into the California driver market.

It’s a Start

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The House, by an overwhelming bipartisan majority—424-8—passed a bill that would strip Russia and its satrap Belarus of Most Favored Nation status. The bill, if passed by the Senate and signed by President Joe Biden (or his veto overridden), would allow us to

raise tariffs on goods from Russia and Belarus and give President Biden power to impose even stricter import taxes on their exports amid the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. …
The bill also sets up strict guidelines for when the president can restore normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus based on the state of the Ukraine war.
The Biden administration will additionally be obligated to push for Russia’s removal from the World Trade Organization and oppose Belarus joining the group, which would subject both to higher tariffs and steeper trade barriers.

Eight Republicans voted against the bill; their concerns centered in part on their push to make President Joe Biden’s Executive Order barring importation of Russian oil statutory by including that in the bill.

The more we pile economic burdens onto Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities Putin’s barbarians are perpetrating on Ukrainians, the better. However, we need to keep such moves in perspective: they’ve forced Putin to withdraw zero battalions from Ukraine, and they forced Putin to drop zero fewer bombs, rockets, or missiles on Ukrainian women, children, hospitals, schools,…. Weapons, ammunition, and medicines need to flow freely and rapidly to the Ukrainian military.