Monthly Archives: December 2017

Good for Workers, Good for Business

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Recall the National Labor Relations Board’s case of a couple of years ago, Browning-Ferris Industries.

Browning-Ferris concerned a recycling center staffed by contractors. The original [NLRB] ruling found the contractors were jointly employed by a staffing firm and Browning-Ferris.

This ruling, if allowed to stand (the case also is in the Federal court system) would have allowed contractors like those at Browning-Ferris, McDonald’s, and any other franchise-centered corporation not only to form unions at individual franchises (which they’ve always been able to do), but also to form a grand union across the corporation.

President Donald Trump appointed a couple of folks to the NLRB to fill vacancies created when two ex-President Barack Obama (D) appointees quit in a snit over Trump’s election.  Now the NLRB has voted to overturn that prior NLRB ruling.

This is good for both business and for employees.  It’s good for business because modern unions have devolved into extortion rackets that threaten a business’ ability to exist through crippling strikes unless the unions get pay and benefits that they demand, even when those things cost more in their per-employee aggregate than the employee’s work is worth.

It’s good for the workers because it means, with labor costs allowed to match the value of the work done, labor won’t be replaced by automation that’s cheaper than the union-elevated labor costs.  Jobs will be preserved, and more hiring will occur.  It’s also good for workers because it frees them to negotiate their own wage and benefit package instead of being dragooned into whatever a union might impose on them.

The Question is a Non Sequitur

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John McKinnon and Brent Kendall, in their Wall Street Journal piece, asked Is FTC Up to the Task of Internet Regulation?

His piece is about the split between what the FCC (the erstwhile “regulator” of the Internet, courtesy of the Obama administration) and the FTC are qualified to regulate.

The question is a bit of a non sequitur, though. The Internet is merely a transport medium, and it needs very little regulation. The FTC is fully up to the task of regulating (ideally with a similarly light touch) trade, which is independent of the medium—highway, railroad, snail mail, or electronic—over which the traded products are transported.

And: lightly regulated commerce is highly conducive to innovation.  Just look at our communications system since the breakup and deregulation of Ma Bell.  And the Internet between its inception and the Obama FCC-imposed impediment.

“SALT and School Taxes”

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That’s the title of a recent Wall Street Journal Notable and Quotable.  The excerpt cited a Bloomberg piece (link in the N&Q) in which that piece’s author, Sahil Kapur, went on at length about how the tax reform and rate reduction bill currently on offer in the Congress will hurt the poor, over-taxed citizens of New Jersey and the State’s education capacity.  Because for the children.

How cynical.

If Kapur and others of his ilk don’t like New Jersey’s high taxes (or New York’s, or California’s, or Illinois’) or how those revenues are allocated, they should stop looking for Federal handouts and get to work on their State governments. After all, it’s Kapur and his fellows, and the rest of the citizens in those States, who’ve been busily electing those overtax and misspend governments.

It’s also true enough that some of those States send more of their citizens’ tax money to the Feds for redistribution than they get back from the Feds, but that just emphasizes the need to put an end to such redistribution of OPM.  It has nothing to do with whether the SALT tax distorting deduction should be preserved.

Who Are You Going to Believe?

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White House Chief of Staff John Kelly personally told former “Apprentice” star Omarosa Manigault Newman that her White House employment had been terminated, despite her insistence to the contrary.

But disappointingly, “Fox News has learned” that Kelly terminated Omarosa in a face-to-face in the White House Situation Room where recording devices of any kind, including cameras, are banned.  However, Fox News “learned” this from the Associated Press, which only “learned” this, in turn, from two carefully unnamed sources—the AP chose not to identify them.

Meanwhile, the lady herself is saying she wasn’t fired, her departure was reasonably amicable—oh, and no, she didn’t make a scene as she was escorted off the premises, as the AP’s rumor also claims.

Here’s what else we know.  The Secret Service, which is responsible for this sort of thing among its many and varied duties, terminated Omarosa’s security clearances and other accesses when her employment ending was determined.  This is completely routine; it’s done with all employees whose employment comes to an end.  She was escorted off the premises, which also is routine; folks without clearances are required to be escorted when they’re in secured areas, and the White House most assuredly is that.  She’s being paid through January 20, even though she no longer works there?  That’s a fairly unusual severance package, but it’s not that unusual.

So: who are you going believe—rumors, some second hand, from deliberately unidentified sources (and so we have no way of knowing whether those sources even exist), or the statements of an on-the-record source, in this case the actual principal?

Vladimir Putin’s Image

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Nathan Hodge is concerned.  He’s worried that our deprecating the Russian Chief Oligarch is only strengthening him at home.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin, being cast in the West as a global supervillain is proving a boon for his image at home.

It’s not at all clear, though, why it matters that any moves in the West, much less by us, might enhance Putin’s domestic image. It’s not like Russians have any say in how their government is populated or what those government men do.

What does matter is whether the West succeeds in circumscribing the nation of Russia’s behavior.  Putin himself isn’t relevant to that.