Tag Archives: political economy

A Minimum Wage Mandate Demonstration

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McDonald’s, which already has ordering stations—kiosks at its restaurant tables from which diners can order their meals and have them delivered to them—at some 500 of its restaurants in Florida, New York, and California.  The Daily Caller, citing CNN Money, says more of these kiosks are scheduled to be added, next year, in McDonald’s restaurants in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and DC.

Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) signed into law a new $15 minimum wage for New York State in 2016, and the University of California has proposed to pay its low-wage employees $15. Florida’s minimum wage will rise I January 2017. Seattle raised its minimum wage to $15 in 2014, followed by San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Notice that.  The additional kiosks are going into areas that have raised (Chicago and Boston in addition to San Fran and Seattle) or will raise soon their required minimum wage, instead of letting that be an item of negotiation between free workers and free employers.  It doesn’t cost $15 to operate one of these kiosks for an hour.  Even given the up-front costs of acquiring and installing the kiosks, their life cycle costs are much less than those of a $15/hr unskilled order-taking worker doing unskilled work, given the worker’s training (even if minimal) and high turnover rate costs.

Which is what the Left has known all along, because serious economists have been telling these Know Betters about these outcomes right along.  The Left’s policies are actively destructive of the prospects for those the Left claims it’s aiming to help, but those of the Left would rather virtue signal and feel good about themselves than do actual good for others.

Aparna Mathur, Resident Scholar for Economic Policy at the American Enterprise Institute [emphasis added]:

We know that we don’t really need someone to take an order…and we will eventually have machines do it. It is risky to fight for something that could put you out of work[.]

There’s an understatement.

 

H/t AEIdeas

Be Careful Out There

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…as you use your Android smartphones.  Some of them, courtesy of a People’s Republic of China company called Shanghai Adups Technology Co, are infected with malware at the point of manufacture.  Phone manufacturers include BLU Products, ZTE, and Huawei; although not all of BLU’s models are infected.  ZTE and Huawei both are State-owned, and both of these refused to answer Consumer Reports‘ requests for information.

The problem is that Shanghai Adups, a supplier of Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA) update services for smartphones, has inserted code that it wrote for the purpose into these phones’ firmware that

transmit[] their owners’ personal data to a computer server in China. It’s not clear how the data was being used, though security experts say it could have been accessible by the Chinese government.

Heads up.

How Democrats View Civility

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A group of maverick history teachers at elite Beacon HS in Manhattan let their kids skip class Tuesday to join a Trump Tower protest, despite objections from colleagues, The Post has learned.

Roughly 200 kids from the Hell’s Kitchen public school were granted hooky passes at 11 a.m. and joined students from across the city to disparage The Donald, sources said.

This is reminiscent of the teachers unions in Wisconsin and of the Wisconsin and Indiana Democratic Parties during their wars on the States’ governments over worker rights not to pay money to unions to which they didn’t belong.  In those cases, the Wisconsin unions encouraged their teachers to lie about where they were as they missed work (with too many doctors complicit in the lies) to “protest” the State government’s legislation to rein in public unions and the Democrats in both States giving themselves permission to abscond from the States, shirking their duties, and halting those two governments because these minority parties didn’t get their way.

So now precious teachers are teaching precious little ones to emulate precious Democrats and these teachers’ unions.

The schools employing these teachers are receiving tons of State dollars under a broad range of programs and grants.  It’s time to review those programs and grants.

Some Climate Moves

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Maybe.  Via Watts Up With That we see these items [emphasis in the originals]:

By Megan Darby in Marrakech

US Republicans are expected to axe billions of dollars in climate finance when they take the White House and Congress in January.

Funds to help poor countries adapt to the impacts of global warming and develop sustainably will be redirected to domestic priorities.

“We are going to cancel billions in payments to the UN climate change programmes and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure,” said President-elect Donald Trump in his 22 October Gettysburg address.

With a Republican majority in the Senate and House of Representatives, there appears to be little standing in his way.

And

What a Trump Win Means For the Global Climate Fight

Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency signals an end to American leadership on international climate policy. With the withdrawal of US support, efforts to implement the Paris agreement and avoid the most devastating consequences of global warming have suffered a huge blow.

by David Victor

With the unexpected triumph of Donald Trump, what’s in store for US climate and energy policies?

[…]

One thing is clear: the Trump administration will inflict more harm on global cooperation around climate than any prior president. After the successful Paris agreement last year, that cooperation was finally poised to make progress with decisive US leadership. I doubt that a Trump presidency will kill the Paris process—too many other countries are too invested in its success. But it will shift the intellectual and political leadership of the process from the United States to other countries, most notably China.

Oh please, oh please.

Loosening Financial Regulations

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Felix Hufeld, President of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, is worried about an outcome of Donald Trump’s election.  He’s concerned that financial regulations laid on in the aftermath of the Panic of 2008, regulations that expanded the reach of Government into men’s financial lives, will begin to be loosened during a Trump administration.

Barely 10 years after the start of the financial crisis I once more hear the bugle calls of deregulation.

And I have the impression that these sounds are becoming louder.  That is not without risk.

To live life is to live with risk.  The thing about risk, though, is that the more Government tries to mandate rules against it, the more Government increases the risks that ordinary folks must live with.

Hufeld has this much right, though:

The [financial] industry, just as politics and regulators, are in need of predictability and continuity—not regulatory volatility[.]

Indeed.  Regulations need to be vastly reduced, Government gotten out of the way of free markets and the free citizens operating in them.  And then politicians and regulators need to leave the remainder alone and stable and not constantly be adding regulations and “tweaking” others.

The problem Hufeld and other bureaucrats of the Left—both in Europe and in the US—have is that they can’t conceive the idea the ordinary citizens are fully capable of making their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.

Or these bureaucrats worry about their own loss of power were ordinary folks freed to make their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.

Or both.