Tag Archives: political economy

Anti-Business Anti-Freedom Left Strikes Again

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Their latest assault comes from left-of-the-west-coast Los Angeles.

The city of Los Angeles will begin requiring most people to provide proof of full COVID-19 vaccination before entering a wide variety of indoor businesses including salons, restaurants, gyms, museums, and theaters.

Alternatively, those with medical conditions that do not allow them to be vaccinated, or those with sincerely held religious beliefs that prevent them from being vaccinated, will be allowed to enter on presentment of a negative Wuhan Virus test done within the prior 72 hours (whose definition of “sincerely held?”). Never mind that the cost of such a test starts at $20 and that the median cost is $127. And you thought the costs at the theater concession counter were high. How’s that blowout or updo at the salon sound now? The testing requirement looks like it’s going to swamp that dinner out you thought you were going to enjoy with the family.

Notice, too, that many—most?—of the businesses in these categories are small businesses, mom-and-pop businesses, low margin businesses.

This isn’t only an assault on American businesses and American business owners, though: it’s also an assault on Americans qua Americans.

It’s a demand that we citizens give up our medical privacy and proclaim to the world what our medical status is, using only the Wuhan Virus situation—which is on the wane—as an initial step to expose all of our medical privacy.

It’s more than that, even. This vaccine mandate, and others like it, are a demand that we citizens give up an essential liberty—a liberty over which we’ve already fought one civil war—our control over our own bodies. It’s an essential liberty that the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party are trying to take away from all of us this time, not just a minority which they held and hold in contempt.

Bank Experts Need Risk Management Advice from Government Bureaucrats

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Federal Reserve System Governor Lael Brainard actually said that with a straight face [Wall Street Journal‘s paraphrase]:

…financial regulators should direct the nation’s biggest banks to take new steps to manage climate-related risks as part of a broader effort to monitor potential hazards posed to the financial system.

She said this (quoted by WSJ) at last week’s conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:

Ultimately, I anticipate it will be helpful to provide supervisory guidance for large banking institutions in their efforts to appropriately measure, monitor, and manage material climate-related risks.

Yeah. Because finance businessmen, bankers, whose businesses live or die on their abilities, are incapable of understanding the financial risks to their businesses without the…guidance…of government bureaucrat/regulators.

School Choice

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Two Ohio State legislators are taking this seriously.

The Ohio Backpack Bill, originally introduced in May and updated with a sub-bill to House Bill 290, would allow all parents to send their children to public school or establish an education savings account. The state would send the money earmarked for that student to the public school or into the parent’s account, allowing it to be used for private school tuition or other education expenses.

That’s all parents, for all children, not just parents of the few who win a lottery, as is the case in so many other jurisdictions. Ohio already has a means-tested criterion; this expands the right to choose, and it expands competition among schools and school systems, which can only improve school performance, including public schools, which in turn can only benefit the children.

Congressman Riordan McClain (R, Upper Sandusky):

It’s about students and increasing the education opportunities for all. This bill seeks to find the right educational opportunity for each of the children in Ohio. It creates a true money-follows-the-child program. Money goes to public school if parents want, and if a parent wants an educational scholarship account, then the state has to put that money in that account, which the parent can use for education expenses.

Stand by for the Keep Teachers Unions Featherbedded movement to crank up.

PRC Pyramids

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The Egyptians invested in pyramids, but those were concrete, physical edifices that satisfied then-national needs.

The People’s Republic of China and its builders invested in a different sort of pyramid, and those ephemeralities are fading into the mists at great cost to the suckers investors.

First, it was the PRC’s Evergrande, with its serial defaulting on its debt obligations. Now it’s the PRC’s Fantasia, reneging on $US206 million worth of its own bonds. It seems likely that others of the PRC’s builders will follow, unless the PRC government men decide to interfere and require different outcomes, regardless of economic and fiscal reality.

I mentioned pyramids. These builders finance their future operations in very large part by selling apartments before they’re even built. That puts their borrowings at risk, unless they can come up with more money—which they do in large party by selling yet more unbuilt apartments.

Bernie Madoff, if not exactly a piker in comparison, certainly didn’t accomplish this much.

Domestic Terrorists

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They aren’t the parents who object, however vociferously, to the misbehaviors of school boards, even though the National School Boards Association and Biden-Harris’ Attorney General Merrick Garland overtly claim so.

On the contrary.

If Garland—and through him, President Joe Biden (D) and Kamala Harris (D) of the Biden-Harris administration—think mothers and fathers vociferously protesting the misbehaviors of school boards are domestic terrorists, then he needs, also, to investigate those school boards’ acts of terrorism.

The school boards’ terrorism of actively abusing children by demanding they wear masks all through the hours of school, which various pediatricians and child development experts have shown stunts those children’s development by strongly inhibiting their socialization and delays their ability to learn the nominal subjects of their lessons.

The school boards’ terrorism of forcing those children to hate themselves and each other over the color of their skin.

The school boards’ terrorism of actively abusing children by demanding they be injected with experimental and unapproved for routine use vaccines.

But, no, nor Garland nor Biden nor Harris have any interest in protecting the rights—or the obligations—of parents or of protecting those children.

Those Progressive-Democrats are interested only in extending their political power and stifling those with the impudence to demur from their abuses.