Category Archives: regulation

Minimum Wage in San Francisco

Posted on by
Reply

City Supervisor Jane Kim, in a recent Letter to the Wall Street Journal Editor sang huzzahs for the city’s $15/hr minimum wage and touted a tax on robots that were replacing those low-skilled workers priced out of the labor market by that minimum wage.

The minimum wage isn’t a pathway to the middle class; it is a safety net to prevent destitution.

And

[A] “robot tax” is a practical way to smooth the transitions caused by automation….

She’s wrong.

I’m sure the robots and kiosks that are replacing those low-skilled workers appreciate being saved from destitution.

However, a true safety net would be a vasty reduction in San Francisco’s runaway regulatory regime and usurious tax scheme.  Then one of the most expensive cities in the nation could become affordable for the low-skilled and other poor.

Instead, the Supervisor wants to tax those robots and reduce them to similar jobless poverty.

Obeying the Law

Posted on by
Reply

In a piece about President Donald Trump’s domestic business policies—specifically, his administration’s lawsuit to block the merger of AT&T with Time Warner Inc and his parallel move to facilitate other kinds of close relationships between companies like AT&T and Time Warner, The Wall Street Journal described a rationale for these apparently conflicting moves: follow existing law, rather than piling on regulation after regulation to govern (new) behaviors.

[T]he actions reveal one consistency, and what might be viewed as an emerging Trump administration regulatory philosophy: instead of new bright-line rules, such as those put in place under the Obama administration, it is stressing the enforcement of longstanding laws and regulations.

Indeed.  A properly free, capitalist market will do its own regulation just fine, with customers voting—and enforcing—with their dollars.

And

The moves are a shift in emphasis from the approach taken by the Obama administration, which in 2015 adopted highly specific rules governing [for instance] internet providers….

Which were simply insulting to adult Americans.  We don’t need to be told, down to the veriest jot or tiddle, how to perform in the market.  We can operate just fine without Government’s micromanagement.  Better, even.

And there’s the illogic of new regulations: if current law or regulations are being disregarded (hence the push for new regulations), how is it possible to expect any new regulations to be followed?

Baristas, Bikinis, and Harvey Weinstein

Posted on by
Reply

Everett, WA, has passed two ordinances that presume to define “lewd” behavior and forces employees to stop wearing bikinis on the job or otherwise showing “too much” skin.  Everett, it seems, has too many coffee shops that employee bikini-clad baristas to suit the prim town fathers.

After all, they claim,

The skin-flaunting coffee servers could turn men into the next Harvey Weinstein.

This is just projection.  These Liberals, with their two ordinances, confess their weakness of character, their own lack of morality, their own inability to resist temptation, and they insultingly assume that all of us are as weak, amoral, and temptation-accepting as they are.

PRC Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

…is reaching into other nations to deprecate their free speech.

Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at Australia’s Charles Sturt University has written a book, Silent Invasion, that details the breadth of influence the People’s Republic of China has achieved within Australia.  His publisher, Allen & Unwin, has decided to “delay” release of the book because the PRC is threatening “defamation action” against the publisher.

What defamation, exactly (and how does a private citizen defame a foreign government, anyway)?  Hamilton says his book is

“very factual, very deeply researched,”…the “first comprehensive national study of Beijing’s program of exerting influence on another nation.”

He said he had documented the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on Australian political parties, universities and cultural organizations, as well as on Chinese living in Australia.

Apparently, on private enterprises, as well.

As Hamilton put it, Allen & Unwin’s decision to acquiesce to the PRC’s threats is

a watershed moment in Australia, when Beijing can suppress free speech.

Hamilton has said he’ll get another publisher, and it would seem he has another instance of PRC “influence” within Australia to describe.  Along the way, I have to wonder why, in future, any author would want to do business with so unreliable a publisher.

Death Panels?

Posted on by
Reply

The Affordable Care Act required Medicare to penalize hospitals with high numbers of heart failure patients who returned for treatment shortly after discharge. New research shows that penalty was associated with fewer readmissions, but also higher rates of death among that patient group.

Because sometimes readmission is necessary for quality care—whether that readmission was driven by later complications, by too-soon original discharge in the Medicare (which is to say Government) pressure to hold down costs first, or by some other factor—but that Government pressure to push the patient out the door also pushes against the patient’s return.  Even when necessary.

Here are a couple of numbers from a study soon to be published in JAMA Cardiology:

One in five heart failure patients returned to the hospital within 30 days before the ACA passed. That dropped to 18.4% after the penalties. Mortality rates increased from 7.2% before the ACA to 8.6% after the penalties….

In other words, an 8% drop in readmissions is associated with a 19% rise in death rates for heart patients.  That’s not a favorable trade-off.

There is a legitimate interest in improving the quality of care for all patients, including those for whose care us taxpayers are paying, but readmission rate is not an accurate measure of that quality.  Readmission rate can only measure…readmission rate.  That metric addresses neither the reasons for readmission nor the reasons for the prior discharge.

Government pressure to hold down readmissions doesn’t quite amount to death panels, but the outcomes seem dismayingly similar.  To be clear, the results of the study do not establish a causal relationship, for heart patients, between the lowered readmission rate and the higher death rate.  However, the magnitude of the apparent association between the two desperately wants further investigation.