Tag Archives: jobs

Minimum Wage Revisited

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Kevin Williamson, at National Review, had a thought that’s only now percolating to the surface of thinking Americans and that still is avoided by the American Left.

Properly understood, raising the minimum wage—and having a minimum wage at all—is camouflage, something to talk about and fight about while we’re not talking about and fighting about the more important underlying issue.  Declaring that all American workers shall be paid at least $15 an hour is not the same as ensuring that all American workers produce $15 an hour worth of value, and, eventually, the disconnect between those two considerations must make itself felt.

That part is well understood, and that’s a part that is deliberately ignored by the Left.  But there’s this, too.

Krugman, Clinton, Sanders, et al., have a backward and primitive view of government.  For them and for their fellow Hobbesians, the Middle Ages never really ended, and the role of the sovereign is to distribute benefices and issue decrees.  Unhappy with your wages?  Petition the prince to decree that they shall be otherwise, and dare any gimlet-eyed economist to point out that the imperial tailor is skimping on the ermine.

Yeah.  Minimum wage mandates are just an excuse for governing by fiat, for substituting rule by law for rule of law.

Williamson took a more gentle position on that; he suggested that it’s a lack of understanding by minimum wage proponents of the facts of economics and of human complexity.

I don’t think the leadership of the Left is that ignorant, or that naïve.  They know full well the facts of economics and of human complexity.  That’s why they carefully elide those things enroute to their rule by (Left’s) law: minimum wage mandates are a tool, not a goal.

Another Intrusive Government Regulation

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US regulators proposed requiring the nation’s largest banks and financial firms to hold back executives’ bonus pay for four years, extending by a year the common industry practice on Wall Street incentive payouts.

The plan would also require a minimum period of seven years for the biggest firms to “claw back” bonuses if it turns out an executive’s actions hurt the institution.

In a free market economy—that is to say, a healthy economy—this would be a business decision, validated or rejected by that business’ owners and its marketplace customers.  However, in this Progressive-Democrat Party administration, this is a Government Decision, made by Government Know Betters, because those actually participating in an economy, with their own money on the line, can’t possibly understand the situation.

Another hint of a Government with too many employees and too little work: this…rule…was developed by no less than six agencies.

A State Appeals Court Missed the Point

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Recall the California case, Vergara v California, in which nine students and the nonprofit advocacy group Students Matter, sued the State of California, arguing that the State’s tenure laws and its firing and layoff policies made it too hard to fire bad teachers, thereby denying students a decent education.  At trial, the students won, and the laws were struck as unconstitutional.  Naturally, teachers unions—California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers—anxious to protect its tenure perks, appealed.

Last Thursday, a State appellate court

said the plaintiffs had not successfully proven that some students were indeed getting an inferior education because of job protection provisions.

The appellate court wrote, with a straight face,

Although the statutes may lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers than a hypothetical alternative system would, the statutes do not address the assignment of teachers.  Instead, administrators—not the statutes—ultimately determine where teachers within a district are assigned to teach.

What the appellate court carefully ignored is that it doesn’t matter where bad teachers are assigned to teach.  The statutes in question require that they be assigned somewhere, to inflict their incompetence on unfortunate students somewhere.

That was the point of the suit: the statutes…lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers….

Score another victory of union prerogative over the welfare of our children.

“Long-Lasting Effects of Socialist Education”

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That’s the title of a paper published at the end of last year by Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln of Goethe University Frankfurt and Paolo Masella of the University of Sussex.

Here’s the abstract:

Political regimes influence contents of education and criteria used to select and evaluate students.  We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree and on several labor market outcomes by exploiting the reorganization of the school system in East Germany after reunification.  Our identification strategy utilizes cut-off birth dates for school enrollment that lead to variation in the length of exposure to the socialist education system within the same birth cohort.  An additional year of socialist education decreases the probability of obtaining a college degree and affects longer-term male labor market outcomes.

And yet, we’re getting just that sort of leftist “education” in our secondary schools, colleges, and universities.

Hmm….

 

h/t AEIdeas

Supreme Court Damage

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This is why we so desperately need a Republican President and a Republican Senate from 2017 on.

The Supreme Court split 4-4 Tuesday on a challenge brought by public school teachers who objected to paying union dues, delivering a big win for the unions[.]

The Liberal block on the Court has continued to vote in lock step, rather than on what the law actually says, this time damaging—as they surely know—not only the Free Speech Clause, but the Free Assembly Clause as well, of the 1st Amendment.

This particular ruling is not “final;” the split ruling only leaves intact the 9th Circuit’s ruling.  The appellate courts remain split on the matter, and a later, full court can hear another case along these lines and strike unions’ ability to collect dues from non-members and to use the dues from members and non-members for political purposes those dues payers do not approve.

That full Court badly needs a conservative, textualist Justice to replace Antonin Scalia.  Our Republic is badly endangered by a bloc-voting Liberal Court that sees the Constitution as malleable in accordance with their own interpretation of today’s needs rather than malleable only through Article V and the folks who make up today’s society, We the People.