Monthly Archives: April 2014

Obama’s War

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…on women and on minorities in general continues apace.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would kill off 500,000 jobs…57% of those jobs are held by women.

Women would be disproportionately harmed: those 57% work out to a loss of 285,000 jobs for women.  I suppose, though, that given this administration’s current buzz, President Barack Obama and his coterie view this as a general good.

Obama’s war is just as devastating on other groups of Americans whom his mouth holds in high favor, but his actions plainly disdain.  The Employment Policies Institute has some of the sordid details.

  • For every 10% increase in the minimum wage, teen employment at small businesses is estimated to decrease by 4.6%-9.0%
  • For every 10% increase in the minimum wage, young black and Hispanic teen employment, in particular, looks to fall 4.9%-8.4%

Hmm….

More Fear of Competition

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..in the arena for ideas, again by Progressives.  This time as they attack children in New York for having a different idea.

A 13-year-old at Orange-Ulster BOCES in New York was suspended for two days last week for the heinous crime of telling her classmates and friends that they did not have to sit for Common Core examinations.  Never mind that she was telling the truth—the exams are entirely voluntary.  Never mind that the word had to come from her because the school administration, in their transparency, had withheld this information from parents.

These Progressives are so terrified of opposing speech that the school’s principle hadn’t even found the courage to talk with the girl’s parents at the time this story broke.

What is it with Progressives that they’re so terrified of contesting their ideas against those of others?  Again, I ask: might it be because they know their own principles are so inadequate?

On Denying Market Forces vis-à-vis Supply and Demand

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Here’s an interesting graph from AEIDeas:

What this illustrates is the outcome of the lack of a market for organs to be transplanted, in this graph, specifically kidneys.

As Mark Perry put it in his article [emphasis his],

While the annual number of kidney transplant operations has remained relatively flat since 2005 in a range between about 16,500 and 17,000, the number of registered patients on the waiting list continues to increase.  From about 65,000 registered patients in 2005, the waiting list for a kidney transplant has increased by more than 50% over the last eight years, and by 35,000 patients, to the 100,019 patients who are currently on the kidney waiting list.

And

We know from basic economic principles that congestion, shortages, and surpluses are always caused by a failure to apply market pricing.

Perry’s conclusion should be an obvious one:

The only realistic, long-term and truly compassionate solution to address America’s worsening kidney shortage is to legalize some form of donor compensation.  That would require Congress to amend the outdated National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 so that people who give kidneys could receive a benefit, perhaps a tax credit, tuition voucher, lifetime health coverage, or a contribution to a retirement plan.

Reasonable men can argue about the nature of the price to be offered, but the fact remains that a market is necessary—with a price to be offered for the good desired.  Indeed, with the price needing to vary with fluctuations in demand and supply, a government mandated “benefit” would seem still too suboptimal.  Let the market determine the price, in dollars.

Certainly such a market would be fraught with danger and need careful controls.  But the danger for those patients in the excess represented by the present 6:1 ratio of patients needing a kidney to patients getting a kidney—2013’s 83,000 more Waiting List patients than transplant patients—is greater.  And with an actual market, the risk of unauthorized organ harvesting—in the US, a small problem currently, but not insignificant to the victims—will go down markedly.

And there will be a sharp decrease in the number of excess patients.

Sounds Like A Reason

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…to continue shedding light on this man, and on Progressivism and the Democratic Party generally.

Nevada’s Democrat Secretary of State [Ross Miller] says he’ll do all in his power to crush a conservative organization that ran ads against him in his campaign to become the state’s attorney general.

As Secretary of State, he’s also the one who oversees elections—including the one in which he’s running.

And he’s doing his “Stifle, Edith” act because he doesn’t like a political ad being run by the State Government Leadership Foundation.  If you’re curious, the ad is here, but the content isn’t particularly important.

What’s important is that this man is so terrified of a contest of ideas in the town square that he’ll do everything he can to evict from that arena any speaker saying things of which he personally disapproves.  What’s important is that this man is so terrified of a contest of ideas in the town square that he’ll do everything he can to make sure that folks in that arena can hear only the speech he deems fit for their tender ears—he won’t allow them to decide for themselves what they’ll listen to.

And this is typical of Progressives/Democrats.  See Brendan Eich and Mozilla, see Condoleezza Rice and Dropbox, see the Obama administration’s IRS.  The list is endless.

It makes me think that Progressives/Democrats know only too well that their ideas can’t survive the disinfecting sunlight of open competition.

What Ayaan Hirsi Ali Might Have Said

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…at Brandeis University, had the school’s…management (I hesitate to say leadership)…not been so cowardly.  Following is excerpted from her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (RTWT).

So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration?  Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era?  Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform.  I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.

Is such an argument inadmissible?  It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews.

The motto of Brandeis University is “Truth even unto its innermost parts.”  That is my motto too.  For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom, and equality of the sexes.

But she couldn’t say that, in that venue.  Other venues will be similarly abject at their peril.  And at ours.