Tag Archives: political economy

Wage Growth

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It’s been almost entirely missed by Progressive-Democrats and almost entirely ignored by the Left and its NLMSM.

Rank-and-file workers are getting bigger raises this year—at least in percentage terms—than bosses.
Wages for the typical worker—nonsupervisory employees who account for 82% of the workforce—are rising at the fastest rate in more than a decade, a sign that the labor market has tightened sufficiently to convey bigger pay increases to lower-paid employees.

Of course, it’s understandable that Progressive-Democrats have missed this. They’ve trained their fire on the Evil Rich and demands that those folks should give up their wealth for redistribution to the…middle class.  All along, Progressive-Democrats have ignored the bottom of the employed and want-to-be-employed spectrum.  Other than, of course, those worthies’ virtue-signaling and anti-employment minimum wage increase demands.

It’s also understandable that the Left and its NLMSM have done their best to ignore this wage increase development.  After all, it comes on the heels of the slowest post-recession (let alone post-Panic) reemployment development since WWII, and it comes so quickly after wages for the typical worker stagnated, and real wages actually declined, during the Obama administration’s post-Panic pseudo-recovery.

Progressive-Democrats also want to talk about the evils of income inequality, while carefully ignoring the opportunity inequalities that would result—have resulted—from their policies.  See, for instance, the results of their mandated minimum wages: net lower income for those still employed low-skill workers and the lower employment rates in thin-margin businesses, second-job family seekers, teenagers looking for their first jobs.  Here are a couple of graphs depicting income inequality.How terrible are these inequalities?

Capitalism and the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Barton Swaim, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, pointed out “socialists'” error when they claim that capitalism is a system.  Their attempts at such a definition—whether of economics, or politics, of…whatever—is necessary, though, in order for them to draw their supposedly favorable comparisons between the socialism flavor of the moment and capitalism.

But capitalism isn’t a system at all, as Simone Weil pointed out 80 years ago, using the then-European economy as her example, and which Swaim cited:

…consists in certain methods of production, consumption, and exchange, which are continually varying, however, and which depend upon certain fundamental relationships: between the production and the circulation of goods, between the circulation of goods and money, between money and production, between money and consumption.

Or, it’s consumers and producers, buyers and sellers, coming together entirely voluntarily and of their own volition, to exchange things each party valued for valued things the other party had—and after which exchange, all parties were better off than they were before the exchange.

The critical part of this arrangement, this unsystematic economy, consists in its voluntary and self-initiated nature.  It cannot be a system because it does not even approach anything systematic.

Sadly, the obfuscation of “systematizing” what they claim to be “capitalism” is all that the 21st century crop of socialists, the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party, have. They certainly have no coherent economic, or political, or whatever policies on which to expound, other than these:

  1. Big Government is the answer

Then recursively,

2. Raising taxes

3. Raising Government spending

Data Transfer and Privacy

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The European Union’s Court of Justice had recommended to it by an adviser to the court in a particular case involving Facebook that

Companies, including US tech giants, should be blocked from transferring European users’ data in some cases if they can’t guarantee it will be handled in compliance with European Union privacy laws….

That would seem to include a large number of international companies besides ours. Yet several EU member nations are moving apace to bring Huawei into their communications networks….

Hmm….

Foolishness

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Russia and Ukraine have agreed a new natural gas transit arrangement to facilitate Russian natural gas through Ukraine to Europe.  The EU was in on the negotiations, and it’s pleased.  Maros Sefcovic, who was Vice-President of the European Commission for the Energy Union until last January and who then transitioned to Vice-President of the European Commission for Interinstitutional Relations and Foresight, led the EU’s part of the negotiations.  He now says,

Russia remains a reliable supplier to European markets and Ukraine maintains its role as a strategic transit country.

Never mind that this reliable supplier has already used Ukrainian transit pipelines to blackmail both Ukraine (over unpaid bills) and the EU (over Russia’s demand that the EU do what Russia wants).  The same Russian government personnel who led those blackmails remain in place in the Russian government.

An Appeal

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Bayer is appealing a District court judgment against it and its Roundup product which has glyphosate as an important ingredient. The judgment is for $25 million, and Bayer thinks it’s a wrong judgment.

The German company’s main argument is that US federal agencies have determined its product is safe and not a carcinogen.

Bayer noted that the

verdict defies both expert regulatory judgment and sound science.

And

Because the EPA has consistently approved the sale of glyphosate without a cancer warning and has stated that including such a warning on the label would render the product misbranded, any state-imposed cancer warning is expressly preempted

Wow. Truth as defense.  What a concept.