Tag Archives: political economy

Obamacare Strikes Yet Again

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Insurers will seek significant premium hikes under President Barack Obama’s health care law this summer….
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For example, in Virginia, a state that reports early, nine insurers returning to the HealthCare.gov marketplace are seeking average premium increases that range from 9.4% to 37.1%.

And

The health law’s nagging problems center on lower-than-hoped-for enrollment, sicker-than-expected customers, and a balky internal stabilization system that didn’t deliver as advertised and was already scheduled to be pared back next year.

Who is truly surprised by this?  Oh, yeah….

Market Choice?

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Can’t have that.

The Obama administration is locked and loaded for a fresh push on gun control initiatives—reportedly moving to advocate for so-called “smart gun” technology….

Smart gun technology research may well be a good idea, and having smart guns—weapons that can be fired only by their legitimate owners—certainly seems like a good idea.

Even Government involvement in funding basic research—the secrets of the universe kind of thing—or doing its own basic research might be a good idea.

However, Government involvement in engineering research, which smart gun tech development surely is, and Government involvement in determining, or even merely jawboning, what products it wants in a free market most assuredly are not legitimate.

These are matters for private citizens, private enterprise, and the market place to determine.

Full stop.

Minimum Wage Laws and Special Groups Impact

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Fast-food workers and civil rights groups in Birmingham, AL, are mounting a constitutional challenge to a recent state law that bars cities from setting their own higher minimum wages, alleging the law violates the workers civil rights.

The plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the state’s Republican Gov Robert Bentley, claiming the bill he signed into law in February was tainted with “racial animus” toward the predominantly African-American city.

One of the lawsuit’s main claims is that the state law disproportionately impacts minority residents who live and work in Birmingham, many in low-wage, fast-food industry jobs that leave them impoverished and on public assistance.

Using their own logic, minimum wage laws, having as they do a disproportionate impact on minorities, on single mothers, and on teens (especially minority teens, but teens generally) are themselves tainted with “racial animus,” “gender animus,” yes, even “age animus.”

Hmm….

A Foreign Policy Fallout

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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced Tuesday that the biggest military contract in Australia’s history, a $40 billion tender to build 12 submarines, will go to a French naval contractor.  That’s a defeat for Japan’s bid, and with it a lost opportunity to deepen cooperation among the leading Pacific democracies facing China’s rising military.

For all of Turnbull’s rationalizations, this was a major factor in rejecting the Japanese offer:

The most significant influence may have been China, Australia’s largest trading partner, which openly campaigned against Japan’s bid. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned his Australian counterpart in February to remember World War II….

Yeah.  The PRC disapproved, and Australia, with the strength of its American ally demonstrated by our response to the PRC’s occupation of the South China Sea, knuckled under.  Don’t think Japan, in the face of our response to the PRC’s occupation attempts in the East China Sea, isn’t watching this very carefully, and not only for the implications to its shipbuilding industry.

Divide and conquer works.  Especially when the two being divided from each other have been abandoned by a United States become timorous in the face of PRC behaviors.

Minimum Wage Revisited

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Kevin Williamson, at National Review, had a thought that’s only now percolating to the surface of thinking Americans and that still is avoided by the American Left.

Properly understood, raising the minimum wage—and having a minimum wage at all—is camouflage, something to talk about and fight about while we’re not talking about and fighting about the more important underlying issue.  Declaring that all American workers shall be paid at least $15 an hour is not the same as ensuring that all American workers produce $15 an hour worth of value, and, eventually, the disconnect between those two considerations must make itself felt.

That part is well understood, and that’s a part that is deliberately ignored by the Left.  But there’s this, too.

Krugman, Clinton, Sanders, et al., have a backward and primitive view of government.  For them and for their fellow Hobbesians, the Middle Ages never really ended, and the role of the sovereign is to distribute benefices and issue decrees.  Unhappy with your wages?  Petition the prince to decree that they shall be otherwise, and dare any gimlet-eyed economist to point out that the imperial tailor is skimping on the ermine.

Yeah.  Minimum wage mandates are just an excuse for governing by fiat, for substituting rule by law for rule of law.

Williamson took a more gentle position on that; he suggested that it’s a lack of understanding by minimum wage proponents of the facts of economics and of human complexity.

I don’t think the leadership of the Left is that ignorant, or that naïve.  They know full well the facts of economics and of human complexity.  That’s why they carefully elide those things enroute to their rule by (Left’s) law: minimum wage mandates are a tool, not a goal.