Tag Archives: political economy

Governance by the Left

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It’s only light bulbs, so who cares?  The Know Betters of the EU care, and the subhead on the Deutsche Welle article at the link says it all.

The sale of halogen lightbulbs is being banned across the EU, as LEDs are touted as greener alternatives. Advocates insist the move will save consumers money in the long run and lead to lower carbon emissions.

If that were true, then LEDs would have no trouble competing in a free market and supplanting halogens quite rapidly and freely.

However.

Ordinary citizens are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted to make the correct decisions.  Irmela Colaco, Energy Efficiency Project Leader for the German environmental group BUND:

It’s high time that the planet and consumers were protected from these power guzzlers[.]

Because consumers are just slack-jawed idiots who cannot protect themselves—or who cannot be trusted to protect themselves in the right way.

This is the Europe our own Leftists want us to emulate.

On Keeping the Senate Informed

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…to the level Senators deem appropriate.  In a Wall Street Journal article about the fate of the newly negotiated trade agreement between the US and Mexico, there was this plaint from one Senator among others:

Lawmakers from both parties have complained that the Trump administration has broken with precedent by not regularly briefing with Capitol Hill and leaving them largely in the dark about crucial details of the negotiations. “Who knows what’s happening,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R, TN), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, with a shrug.

That’s all to the good. You guys leak like a sieve, not out of carelessness, but deliberately for personal political gain. And those leaks also often blow up negotiations in progress. But your leaks are more important.

Now the thing will be submitted to you, and you’ll have all the time you need to study it and vote it up or down.

Get over yourselves.

A Minimum Wage

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David Neumark, an Economics Professor at the University of California, Irvine, thinks he has an idea on how to implement “fairly” a minimum wage.  Unfortunately, his idea isn’t even good enough to be bad satire. He wants to

provide a tax credit of 50% of the difference between the prior minimum wage and the new minimum wage for each hour of labor employed. It would phase out at wages above the new minimum wage and, as wage inflation erodes, the value of the new minimum wage.

Thus, taxpayers would pay a significant fraction of each minimum wage—folks in New York would pay into the minimum wage of Seattle’s residents, for instance.  Worse, the employer in question would no longer be fully engaged in the wages of his own work force.

With this, Neumark thinks he can

transform the minimum wage into a more sensible redistributive policy.

This, of course, is a nonsensical oxymoron (excuse the redundancy). The only sensible redistributive policy, the only moral redistributive policy, is a voluntary payment of value for value received. That’s an exchange that can only be determined by the participants.  It’s also an exchange that keeps the employer and his workers fully and solely answerable to each other.

Voters think income inequality is too high, and politicians who want to keep their jobs must respond.

No, we don’t, and politicians who want to keep their jobs must recognize that.  Politicians must stop treating their poorer constituents like inanimate tools whose sole purpose is vote harvesting, and instead them like the human beings they are.

Irony

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Her name is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), a candidate for the House of Representatives.  Recall that Ocasio-Cortez is an ardent supporter of minimum wage laws, and as a start wants the minimum to be $15/hr.  New York City already has mandated that minimum wages in the city rise to $15/hr by the end of this year.

She went by her favorite coffee shop, The Coffee Shop in Union Square (which employs 150 folks), over the weekend to shoot the breeze because, she says, she used to work there. Then she discovered the place is closing this fall…because it can’t afford the rising labor costs on top of high rent and high regulation costs.

Interesting Graph

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A recent Wall Street Journal article concerned the duration and potential durability of our current stock market bull run.  The bull has lasted

3,453 days since the S&P 500 hit its low of 666 on March 9, 2009. Since then, the broadest US blue-chip index has more than quadrupled in price terms….

What’s interesting to me, though, is this graph that was presented early in the piece.

Notice the gray line, which represents the Shanghai Composite Index.  The People’s Republic of China’s index representing the PRC’s stock market, such as it is, bottomed out some months earlier than did our market and those of Europe (Stoxx) and Japan (Nikkei)—and since then it has never really recovered, rising only slightly since that bottom.

It would seem (preaching to the choir, perhaps) that government manipulation of an economy doesn’t work very well—not even when it’s done by the smartest folks in the PRC room.