Category Archives: regulation

Tipped Wages or Not?

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McDonald’s is insisting that every restaurant—especially fast food restaurants—should be required to do away with tip-based wages and pay servers at least the Federal-level minimum wage. There are a couple of major disingenuosities in the surrounding argument.

McDonald’s Chief Executive Chris Kempczinski:

Right now, there’s an uneven playing field,

because casual-dining restaurants, bars, and other establishments to pay below the typical minimum wage to tip-earning workers. If he thinks so, he should push for getting his restaurant able to similarly pay his workers rather than demanding that others kowtow to his business model.

Kempczinski went on:

If you are a restaurant that allows tips or has tips as part of your equation, you’re essentially getting the customer to pay for your labor[.]

This is an especially blatant bit of disingenuousness. The customer already is paying for the restaurant’s labor. The customer also is paying for the restaurant’s cooking, food and food preparation inputs, rent, management salaries, every cost the restaurant incurs. Those costs are included in the prices the restaurant puts on its menu. Tipping is just a customer-facing line item on the bill.

This is nothing but a regulated business manager venally and self-servingly trying to capture the regulators and impose added costs on his smaller and weaker competitors.

Nationalizing Companies

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The Wall Street Journal editors are badly mistaken here.

Mr Trump accused Kamala Harris of being a socialist, but the Biden Administration never nationalized companies.

Routine political polemics on the first part of that; functionally, and obviously, wrong on the second part.

Nationalizing individual companies is piffle. The Obama reign nationalized a whole industry—our health care “insurance” coverage industry via Obamacare, which required all of us to buy an Obamacare policy whether we wanted to or not, whether we needed one or not.

It’s true that the Biden administration didn’t formally nationalize any companies, but it functionally nationalized far more industries than that piker Obama with the Biden administration’s excessive regulation: ICE-powered vehicles and our energy production industries, our banking industry with its pressure to lend to these types and refuse to lend to those types, and even our press with its pressure to spike these news reports and to push those news reports, all the while pushing for editorials that favored administration ideologies while panning or ignoring policies of which Biden and his minions disapproved.

None of this is to suggest that the Federal government taking an ownership stake in Intel or any company is a good idea or even an acceptable one. It isn’t. But it’s telling that these opinion writers can make such an obviously wrong claim at the outset of their piece.

Mail-in Ballots

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The Just the News headline lays out the error.

Trump’s push for ending mail-in ballots and voting machines means process likely to fall on states

This is what Art I, Sect 4, of our Constitution says about elections:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

Whether Congress chooses to tailor a ban on mail-in ballots (other than, I say, for military personnel stationed outside their voting precincts and businessmen on extended business-related travel outside their precincts) and electronic voting machines to each of the 50 States or enact a nationwide ban, such a move would be entirely constitutional.

Yes and No

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Just one example on the matter of drug approvals.

A case in point is Replimune’s melanoma treatment, which the FDA rejected last month. About a third of patients who hadn’t responded to prior immunotherapy showed a strong response to Replimune’s in a clinical trial.
Tumors shrank in nearly all patients, and responses proved durable over three years. Serious side effects were rare. Oncologists who treated patients in the trial hailed the results.

These are responses in absolute terms. The drug was safe, and it worked.

The FDA blocked its release into the market though:

[T]he FDA said the trial was “not considered to be an adequate and well-controlled clinical investigation that provides substantial evidence of effectiveness.”
Its quibble is that the trial lacked a control group.

This is a demand for a relative outcome—whether the drug worked better or worse, and whether it was safer or less so, than the status quo. The status quo is what a control group presents.

The answer, though, is not to stop “quibbling” about control groups when assessing drug trial efficacy. Instead, it’s necessary for the FDA to get out of the business of requiring, as a condition of approval, that a drug work. FDA’s role should hold out only for assessing a drug’s safety. The market, formed by patients and their doctors, will do a perfectly fine job of assessing the drug’s effectiveness, with no more exceptions than are extant in any other market. That Replimune’s drug was shown to work in absolute terms is a happy additional outcome and should not represent even this much of an acceptance criterion.

This is where FDA Commissioner and medical doctor Marty Makary can—and should—make the changes to the FDA’s approval processes. A doctor’s primary injunction is “first, do no harm.” So it should be with the FDA. A doctor continues, with his patient, actively to treat the medical problem. The FDA, on the other hand, should stop at the do no harm part. Let the practicing doctors and their patients do the rest.

Can’t Come Soon Enough

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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is moving to rescind an Obama-reign rule that classified atmospheric CO2—plant food—as a pollutant and a threat to public health.

The rescission can’t come soon enough; it’s cost us more than enough already in dollars and foregone hydrocarbon-sourced—which is to say, cheap and reliable and clean—energy generation. It’s cost us more than enough already in dollars diverted to patently unreliable “green” energy sources like solar and wind, the former which fails utterly when the sun doesn’t shine ( and that’s not only at night), and the latter which fails utterly when the wind doesn’t blow or it blows too hard. Windmills have additional, drastically destructive, impacts on birds, on aquatic life, and on our beaches when offshore windmills shed their blades.

Naturally, the Climate Funding Industry and a potful of fee-seeking lawyers will sue and try to tie up the rescission for as long as they can. That just puts a premium on pushing ahead, promptly, with the rescission.