Dear Bill O'Reilly - no Minimum Wage is "Exploitative"?

Sent to oreilly@foxnews.com

Bill,

 I wanted to inquire about your assertion tonight that "Without the minimum wage there would be exploitation of workers".  Why would exploitation have to result in a world without a minimum wage?  Employed workers are not slaves - they may agree to work for wages offered by employers, or they may decline to work for those wages.  If the wages offered by employers are not sufficient, employers will not be able to attract employees, and businesses will be forced to raise their wages.  If the offered wages are agreeable to workers, both the employer and employee are satisfied with the arrangement, which is hardly "exploitation".  Why do the laws of economic equilibrium related to supply and demand in the labor market result in an exploitative scenario?  It seems odd that equilibrium in a free market is termed exploitative.

 Secondly, how did we arrive at the amount of $10.10 for a minimum wage?  In a free market, the "appropriate" minimum wage is set automatically as employers vie for labor.  Anything other than the equilibrium wage results in a wasteful, sub-optimal outcome from a societal perspective and is disconnected to the actual value provided by the activity.  The only way to justify $10.10 is to say that it "feels right", which might be satisfying from an emotional perspective but begs the question "why not $20 an hour or $50 an hour"?  The answer is because the activity is not worth that wage.  The only way to set the wage equal to the value of the activity is to allow employers to compete for labor rather than have government set an arbitrary minimum wage that distorts the labor market and results in increased unemployment and reduced economic growth.

If you disagree with these points (and I assume you do), I hope you'll consider explaining why in a future segment.
      

The Imperial Presidency of Barack Obama

Jan. 28, 2014 6:57 p.m. ET

Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president's persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

The president's taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology. The great 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu observed: "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates." America's Founding Fathers took this warning to heart, and we should too.

Yet rather than honor this duty, President Obama has openly defied it by repeatedly suspending, delaying and waiving portions of the laws he is charged to enforce. When Mr. Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.Rule of law doesn't simply mean that society has laws; dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. Rather, rule of law means that we are a nation ruled by laws, not men. That no one—and especially not the president—is above the law. For that reason, the U.S. Constitution imposes on every president the express duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

On many of those policy issues, reasonable minds can disagree. Mr. Obama may be right that some of those laws should be changed. But the typical way to voice that policy disagreement, for the preceding 43 presidents, has been to work with Congress to change the law. If the president cannot persuade Congress, then the next step is to take the case to the American people. As President Reagan put it: "If you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat" of electoral accountability.

President Obama has a different approach. As he said recently, describing his executive powers: "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone." Under the Constitution, that is not the way federal law is supposed to work.

The Obama administration has been so brazen in its attempts to expand federal power that the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the Justice Department's efforts to expand federal power nine times since January 2012.

There is no example of lawlessness more egregious than the enforcement—or nonenforcement—of the president's signature policy, the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Obama has repeatedly declared that "it's the law of the land." Yet he has repeatedly violated ObamaCare's statutory text.

The law says that businesses with 50 or more full-time employees will face the employer mandate on Jan. 1, 2014. President Obama changed that, granting a one-year waiver to employers. How did he do so? Not by going to Congress to change the text of the law, but through a blog post by an assistant secretary at Treasury announcing the change.

The law says that only Americans who have access to state-run exchanges will be subject to employer penalties and may obtain ObamaCare premium subsidies. This was done to entice the states to create exchanges. But, when 34 states decided not to establish state-run exchanges, the Obama administration announced that the statutory words "established by State" would also mean "established by the federal government."

The law says that members of Congress and their staffs' health coverage must be anObamaCare exchange plan, which would prevent them from receiving their current federal-employee health subsidies, just like millions of Americans who can't receive such benefits. At the behest of Senate Democrats, the Obama administration instead granted a special exemption (deeming "individual" plans to be "group" plans) to members of Congress and their staffs so they could keep their pre-existing health subsidies.

Most strikingly, when over five million Americans found their health insurance plans canceled because ObamaCare made their plans illegal—despite the president's promise "if you like your plan, you can keep it"—President Obama simply held a news conference where he told private insurance companies to disobey the law and issue plans that ObamaCare regulated out of existence.

In other words, rather than go to Congress and try to provide relief to the millions who are hurting because of the "train wreck" of ObamaCare (as one Senate Democrat put it), the president instructed private companies to violate the law and said he would in effect give them a get-out-of-jail-free card—for one year, and one year only. Moreover, in a move reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's looking-glass world, President Obama simultaneously issued a veto threat if Congress passed legislation doing what he was then ordering.

In the more than two centuries of our nation's history, there is simply no precedent for the White House wantonly ignoring federal law and asking private companies to do the same. As my colleague Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa asked, "This was the law. How can they change the law?"

Similarly, 11 state attorneys general recently wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying that the continuing changes to ObamaCare are "flatly illegal under federal constitutional and statutory law." The attorneys general correctly observed that "the only way to fix this problem-ridden law is to enact changes lawfully: through Congressional action."

In the past, when Republican presidents abused their power, many Republicans—and the press—rightly called them to account. Today many in Congress—and the press—have chosen to give President Obama a pass on his pattern of lawlessness, perhaps letting partisan loyalty to the man supersede their fidelity to the law.

But this should not be a partisan issue. In time, the country will have another president from another party. For all those who are silent now: What would they think of a Republican president who announced that he was going to ignore the law, or unilaterally change the law? Imagine a future president setting aside environmental laws, or tax laws, or labor laws, or tort laws with which he or she disagreed.

That would be wrong—and it is the Obama precedent that is opening the door for future lawlessness. As Montesquieu knew, an imperial presidency threatens the liberty of every citizen. Because when a president can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, he is no longer a president.

By: Senator TED CRUZ

State of the Union Thoughts

 “He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
— Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution

No declaration regarding the state of our union - possibly because he can't say it is strong.

"The notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead in America" - Nice to hear the President talk about responsibility and hard work.  It seems we often focus on government as the primary mechanism for personal improvement.

"America does not stand still and neither will I - so wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families; that's what I'm going to do." - What a strange statement from the person who is entrusted with implementing legislation, not sidestepping it.  From a Constitutional perspective, this remark should be very concerning. 

"We can take the money we save [...] and use it to create jobs rebuilding our roads, upgrading our ports, and unclogging our commutes" - Shouldn't the government already be doing this?  It seems this is an essential and appropriate function of government that should be prioritized over other discretionary spending.  

These zones with reduced regulations are an interesting proposal - if these are good ideas, why not have these reduced regulations everywhere?  How can we recognize that reducing regulation spurs growth but then deny that it should be one more broadly and that it should be restricted to certain zones?

How ironic it is that the President touts the promise of natural gas when his party for years attempted to block natural gas exploration via fracking due to unfounded environmental concerns (note the connection between increase regulation and reduced growth).

"Invest more in fuels of the future" - the government does not need to be picking winners and losers in the energy industry.  They should abolish tax incentives for big oil and incentives for "sustainable" energy.  The free market will find the most efficient equilibrium regarding energy. 

"The debate is settled - climate change is a fact" - so what?  The question isn't whether or not the climate is changing (although interestingly it hasn't in the last 15 years).  The questions are 1) are we responsible for the change 2) can we do anything about it and 3) how much are we willing to spend and harm our economy to impact the environment?

Immigration reform - by this he means ignoring the law and forgiving illegal behavior

Regarding the story of the woman who lost her unemployment benefits - "I'm not dependent on the government" - and yet she's writing to complain about losing her government benefits.  Also, what is the President's proposal regarding the limit of unemployment benefits?  It seems he would extend them indefinitely.  And if unemployment benefits spur the economy, why not give everyone money - wouldn't that spur the economy even more?  We don't do that because it doesn't work as a stimulative mechanism because the money going into the economy also comes out of the economy in the form of taxes...

"Woman still make $.77 for every dollar a man makes; that is wrong, and in 2014 it is an embarrassment" - Really?  A few questions 1) is this taken in aggregate (which is skewed by the industries women and men tend to self-select) or are we talking about apples-to-apples within the same job? 2) Are the women working the same number of hours as the men in these apples-to-apples jobs? 3) Is the experience level equal for the men and women in these apples-to-apples jobs?  If these factors are not accounted for, this is basically a lie, or at the very least a useless fact.  It would be like complaining that a janitor and lawyer have dissimilar incomes.

The President's story about the pizza parlor owner giving a raise to his employees - if it was in the owner's interest to raise his employees' wages (because his employees work harder), why are mandatory regulations needed?  A regulation is only needed if it is NOT in their business interest and they must be forced by law to comply with what the central planners believe is best.

"Give America a raise" - the President is always very generous with other people's money.

"Send me legislation that protects taxpayers from footing the bill for a housing crisis every again." - Not sure exactly what this means, but if it means "too big to fail" is going to be reconsidered, I'm all for it.


Regarding the President's comments about the ACA - his basic point is insurance prices are now totally disconnected from insurance costs - this is not sustainable in the long-run unless those who should be covered cheaply pay more to cover those who aren't paying their fair share.

Hmm - hard work and responsibility mentioned a second time.  Now it's starting to sound like a throw-away line, especially since it isn't really reflected in any of the policies being proposed.

"We will complete our mission there [Afghanistan]" - what, exactly, is our mission there right now?  It isn't exactly clear.  Generally our goal in a war is to win.  I haven't heard anything about winning in a long time...

"Close the prison at Guantanamo Bay" - Any move those dangerous individuals where, exactly?

 Iran - the President claims Iran is rolling back parts of its program.  Strange, the Iranian president didn't seem to get the memo.


Love the featuring of the Army Ranger injured by the roadside bomb.  A great moment in the speech and wonderful to see our military men and women honored.

What wasn't heard today (because the President apparently doesn't have anything to say about these topics):
1) Anything about Syria (beyond a vague promise to support some elements in the country) - remember when Assad had to go and that he would pay for his use of chemical weapons?  By "paying", apparently he means forcing Assad to promise not to do it again.

2) Anything about bringing the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack to justice
3) Anything of substance about NSA snooping or the snooping on our allies

4) Anything about trade agreements that would bring jobs to the US

New Spending Proposed by the President:
1) "Investment" in fuels of the future
2) Spending on Infrastructure
3) Increased spending on pre-K education
4) Extending unemployment benefits
5) Increased spending on student loans
6) Increasing the minimum wage for Federal Employees
7) Increased tax spending through the Earned Income Tax Credit
8) Medicaid spending via the ACA
9) Subsidies for companies that create domestic manufacturing jobs
10) Tax spending via MY-RA (some marketing work needed on that program name)

Spending Reductions Proposed by the President
1) Reducing oil subsidies
2) Yeah, that first one was pretty much it.

And that's why the national debt is through the roof.

The Inequality Bogeyman

The Inequality Bogeyman

By Thomas Sowell - January 28, 2014

During a recent lunch in a restaurant, someone complimented my wife on the perfume she was wearing. But I was wholly unaware that she was wearing perfume, even though we had been in a car together for about half an hour, driving to the restaurant.

My sense of smell is very poor. But there is one thing I can smell far better than most people -- gas escaping. During my years of living on the Stanford University campus, and walking back and forth to work at my office, I more than once passed a faculty house and smelled gas escaping. When there was nobody home, I would leave a note, warning them.

When walking past the same house again a few days later, I could see where the utility company had been digging in the yard -- and, after that, there was no more smell of gas escapting.  But apprently the people who lived in these homes had not smelled anything.

These little episodes have much wider implications. Most of us are much better at some things than at others, and what we are good at can vary enormously from one person to another. Despite the preoccupation -- if not obsession -- of intellectuals with equality, we are all very unequal in what we do well and what we do badly.

It may not be innate, like a sense of smell, but differences in capabilities are inescapable, and they make a big difference in what and how much we can contribute to each other's economic and other well-being. If we all had the same capabilities and the same limitations, one individual's limitations would be the same as the limitations of the entire human species.

We are lucky that we are so different, so that the capabilities of many other people can cover our limitations.

One of the problems with so many discussions of income and wealth is that the intelligentsia are so obsessed with the money that people receive that they give little or no attention to what causes money to be paid to them, in the first place.

The money itself is not wealth. Otherwise the government could make us all rich just by printing more of it. From the standpoint of a society as a whole, money is just an artificial device to give us incentives to produce real things -- goods and services.

Those goods and services are the real "wealth of nations," as Adam Smith titled his treatise on economics in the 18th century.

Yet when the intelligentsia discuss such things as the historic fortunes of people like John D. Rockefeller, they usually pay little -- if any -- attention to what it was that caused so many millions of people to voluntarily turn their individually modest sums of money over to Rockefeller, adding up to his vast fortune.

What Rockefeller did first to earn their money was find ways to bring down the cost of producing and distributing kerosene to a fraction of what it had been before his innovations. This profoundly changed the lives of millions of working people.

Before Rockefeller came along in the 19th century, the ancient saying, "The night cometh when no man can work" still applied. There were not yet electric lights, and burning kerosene for hours every night was not something that ordinary working people could afford. For many millions of people, there was little to do after dark, except go to bed.

Too many discussions of large fortunes attribute them to "greed" -- as if wanting a lot of money is enough to cause other people to hand it over to you. It is a childish idea, when you stop and think about it -- but who stops and thinks these days?

The transfer of money was a zero-sum process. What increased the wealth of society was Rockefeller's cheap kerosene that added hundreds of hours of light to people's lives annually.

Edison, Ford, the Wright brothers, and innumerable others also created unprecedented expansions of the lives of ordinary people. The individual fortunes represented a fraction of the wealth created.

Even those of us who create goods and services in more mundane ways receive income that may be very important to us, but it is what we create for others, with our widely varying capabilities, that is the real wealth of nations.

Intellectuals' obsession with income statistics -- calling envy "social justice" -- ignores vast differences in productivity that are far more fundamental to everyone's well-being. Killing the goose that lays the golden egg has ruined many economies.

Judicial activism isn’t a bad thing

Some argue that "activist judges" is a relative term (i.e. activism is in the eye of the beholder).  But there is a big difference between courts enacting law without legislative authority and a more proper role of ensuring that government over-reach doesn't encroach on individual freedom. 

Judicial activism isn’t a bad thing

By George F. Will, Published: January 22 

Disabusing the Republican Party of a cherished dogma, thereby requiring it to forgo a favorite rhetorical trope, will not win Clark M. Neily III the gratitude of conservatives who relish denouncing “judicial activism.” However, he and his colleagues at the libertarianInstitute for Justice believe the United States would be more just if judges were less deferential to legislatures.

In his book “Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government,” Neily writes that the United States is not “a fundamentally majoritarian nation in which the ability to impose one’s will on others through law is a sacred right that courts should take great pains not to impede.” America’s defining value is not majority rule but individual liberty.

Many judges, however, in practicing what conservatives have unwisely celebrated as “judicial restraint,” have subordinated liberty to majority rule. Today, a perverse conservative populism panders to two dubious notions — that majorities should enjoy a largely untrammeled right to make rules for everyone, and that most things legislatures do reflect the will of a majority.

Conservatives’ advocacy of judicial restraint serves liberalism by leaving government’s growth unrestrained. This leaves people such as Sandy Meadows at the mercy of government acting as protector of the strong.

Meadows was a Baton Rouge widow who had little education and no resources but was skillful at creating flower arrangements, which a grocery store hired her to do. Then Louisiana’s Horticulture Commission pounced.

It threatened to close the store as punishment for hiring an unlicensed flower arranger. Meadows failed to get a license, which required a written test and the making of four flower arrangements in four hours, arrangements judged by licensed florists functioning as gatekeepers to their own profession, restricting the entry of competitors. Meadows, denied reentry into the profession from which the government had expelled her, died in poverty, but Louisianans were protected by their government from the menace of unlicensed flower arrangers.

What Louisiana does, and all states do in conferring favors through regulations that violate individuals’ rights, is obviously unjust and would be declared unconstitutional if courts would do their duty. Their duty is to protect individual liberty, including the right to earn a living, against special-interest legislation. Instead, since judicial abdication became normal during the New Deal, courts almost invariably defer to legislatures’ economic regulations, which frequently are rent-seeking by private factions.

Courts justify dereliction of judicial duty as genuflection at the altar of majority rule, as long as the court can discern, or even imagine, a “rational basis” for a regulation — even if the legislature never articulated it. Never mind the absurdity of the fiction that a majority of Louisianans know about, let alone care about, licensing flower arrangers.

Conservatives clamoring for judicial restraint, meaning deference to legislatures, are waving a banner unfurled a century ago by progressives eager to emancipate government, freeing it to pursue whatever collective endeavors it fancies, sacrificing individual rights to a spurious majoritarian ethic.

The beginning of wisdom is recognizing the implications of this fact: Government is almost never disinterested. Today’s administrative state is a congeries of interests, each of which has a metabolic urge to enlarge its dominion and that of the private-sector faction with which it collaborates. As Neily says, “Much of modern constitutional law depends on denying — or at least ignoring — the realities of the political process.” Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit says of “rational basis” jurisprudence: “The judiciary justifies its reluctance to intervene by claiming incompetence — apparently, judges lack the acumen to recognize corruption, self-interest, or arbitrariness in the economic realm — or deferring to the majoritarian imperative,” which means “the absence of any check on the group interests that all too often control the democratic process.”

This process, Neily rightly insists, is not self-legitimizing, which is why judicial passivity is inconsistent with constitutional government. Between 1954 and 2002, the Supreme Court invalidated 103 of the 15,817 laws that Congress passed — 0.65 percent. It struck down about 0.5 percent of federal regulations and less than 0.05 percent of state laws. Neily says, “In light of history, experience, and common sense, it is implausible to suppose the federal government hits the constitutional strike zone 99.5 percent of the time.”

Neily argues that to say that judicial invalidations of legislative acts should be rare is no more sensible than saying NFL referees should rarely penalize players for holding. Conservatism’s task, politically hazardous but constitutionally essential, is to urge courts to throw as many flags as there are infractions

Obamacare Strikes Again

I suppose this is all the evil corporation's fault, right?  Democrats will blame the capitalist company despite creating regulations that are in essence telling the corporation to discontinue healthcare coverage.  This is only the beginning - more companies are going to follow suit. 

Target to drop health insurance coverage for part-time workers

Target announced Tuesday that it would end healthcare coverage for its part-time workers. Above, customers check out at a Target store in Chicago in November. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg /November 28, 2013)

By Ricardo Lopez

January 22, 2014, 8:59 a.m.

Target Corp. announced Tuesday that it would end healthcare coverage for its part-time workers, citing options available to them in state and federal healthcare marketplaces.

In a corporate blog post, the Minneapolis company said that the majority of its part-time workforce does not enroll in healthcare coverage currently offered by the retailer. Target said that less than 10% of its total workforce, about 360,000, participates in the healthcare plans offered to part-time employees.

Healthcare law changes, said Target's executive vice president of human resources, Jodee Kozlak, have made more options available.  

President Obama's new healthcare law requires large companies to offer coverage to employees working 30 hours a week or more or pay a penalty. Many employers have been preparing for the the higher costs. Some companies, such as United Parcel Service Inc., have said they would end coverage for employees' spouses if they had access to health insurance through their own employers. 

"In fact, by offering them insurance, we could actually disqualify many of them from being eligible for newly available subsidies that could reduce their overall health insurance expense," Kozlak said.

Under the healthcare law, some individuals would be eligible for subsidies based on their income to help offset the costs of enrolling for coverage.  

The changes will be effective starting April 1.

Part-time workers -- those who work between 20 and 31 hours a week -- who will be bumped off the Target healthcare plan are eligible for a cash payment of $500 to help in the transition, the company said. Additionally, Target has hired a firm that will help those workers select plans in state and federal healthcare marketplaces.

Kozlak said Target had no plans to cut workers' hours.

Shares for Target were down 29 cents, or .49%, Wednesday to $58.91.

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-target-health-coverage-part-time-workers-20140122,0,889575.story#ixzz2rLLPfjyT

Chill Out

Chill Out

By John Stossel - January 22, 2014

The Hill, the newspaper that covers Congress, says this year, there will be a major policy battle over "climate change." Why?

We already waste billions on pointless gestures that make people think we're addressing global warming, but the earth doesn't notice or care.

What exactly is "global warming" anyway?  That's really four questions:

1. Is the globe warming? Probably. Global temperatures have risen (but not in the last 15 years). Climate changes. Always has. Always will.  In the 1970s, scientists were warning about global cooling. 

2. Is the warming caused by man? Maybe. There's decent evidence that at least some of it is.

3. But is global warming a crisis? Far from it. It's possible that it will become a crisis.

Some computer models suggest big problems, but the models aren't very accurate. Some turned out to be utterly wrong. Clueless scaremongers like Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Cal., seize on weather disasters to blame man's carbon output. After Oklahoma's tragic tornadoes last year, Boxer stood on the floor of the Senate and shrieked, "Carbon could cost us the planet!" But there were actually fewer tornadoes last summer.

4. If the globe is warming, can America do anything about it? No. What we do now is pointless. I feel righteous riding my bike to work. That's just shallow. Even if all Americans replaced cars with bicycles, switched to fluorescent light bulbs, got solar water heaters, etc., it would have no discernible effect on the climate. China builds a new coal-fueled power plant almost every week; each one obliterates any carbon reduction from all our windmills and solar panels.

Weirdly, the only thing that's reduced America's carbon output has been our increased use of natural gas (it releases less greenhouse gas than oil and coal). But many environmentalists fight the fracking that produces it.

Someday, we'll probably invent technology that could reduce man's greenhouse gas creation, but we're nowhere close to it now. Rather than punish poor people with higher taxes on carbon and award ludicrous subsidies to Al Gore's "green" investments, we should wait for the science to advance.

If serious warming happens, we can adjust, as we've adjusted to big changes throughout history. It will be easier to adjust if America is not broke after wasting our resources on trendy gimmicks like windmills.

Environmental activists say that if we don't love their regulations, we "don't care about the earth." Bunk. We can love nature and still hate the tyranny of bureaucrats' rules.

We do need some rules. It's good that government built sewage treatment plants. Today, the rivers around Manhattan are so clean that I swim in them. It's good that we forced industry to stop polluting the air. Scrubbers in smokestacks and catalytic converters on cars made our lives better. The air gets cleaner every time someone replaces an old car with a new one.

But those were measures against real pollution -- soot, particulates, sulfur, etc. What global warming hysterics want to fight is merely carbon dioxide. That's what plants breathe. CO2 may prove to be a problem, but we don't know that now.

The world has real problems, though: malaria, malnutrition, desperate poverty. Our own country, while relatively rich, is deep in debt. Obsessing about greenhouse gases makes it harder to address these more serious problems.

Environmentalists assume that as people get richer and use more energy, they pollute more. The opposite is true. As nations industrialize, they pay more attention to pollution. Around the world, it's the most prosperous nations that now have the cleanest air and water.

Industrialization allows people to use fewer resources. Instead of burning trees for power, we make electricity from natural gas. We figure out how to get more food from smaller pieces of land.

And one day we'll probably even invent energy sources more efficient than oil and gas. We'll use them because they're cost-effective, not because government forces us to.

So let's chill out about global warming. We don't need more micromanagement from government. We need less.

Then free people -- and rapidly increasing prosperity -- will create a better world. 

Inconvenient Facts

The pay disparity facts are most important aspects of this article - the rest is basically just mud-throwing...

Fact-Free Liberals

By Thomas Sowell - January 21, 2014

Someone summarized Barack Obama in three words -- "educated," "smart" and "ignorant." Unfortunately, those same three words would describe all too many of the people who come out of our most prestigious colleges and universities today.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again. Economic equality?

That was tried in the 19th century, in communities set up by Robert Owen, the man who coined the term "socialism".  Those communities all collapsed.

It was tried even earlier, in 18th century Georgia, when that was a British colony. People in Georgia ended up fleeing to other colonies, as many other people would vote with their feet in the 20th century, by fleeing many other societies around the world that were established in the name of economic equality.

But who reads history these days? Moreover, those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the left -- which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study -- are not likely to get much attention.

The net results are bright people, with impressive degrees, who have been told for years how brilliant they are, but who are often ignorant of facts that might cause them to question what they have been indoctrinated with in schools and colleges.

Recently Kirsten Powers repeated on Fox News Channel the discredited claim that women are paid only about three-quarters of what a man is paid for doing the same work.

But there have been empirical studies, going back for decades, showing that there is no such gap when the women and men are in the same occupation, with the same skills, experience, education, hours of work and continuous years of full-time work.

Income differences between the sexes reflect the fact that women and men differ in all these things -- and more. Young male doctors earn much more than young female doctors. But young male doctors work over 500 hours a year more than young female doctors.

Then there is the current hysteria which claims that people in the famous "top one percent" have incomes that are rising sharply and absorbing a wholly disproportionate share of all the income in the country.

But check out a Treasury Department study titled "Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005." It uses income tax data, showing that people who were in the top one percent in 1996 had their incomes fall -- repeat, fall -- by 26 percent by 2005.

What about the other studies that seem to say the opposite? Those are studies of income brackets, not studies of the flesh-and-blood human beings who are moving from one bracket to another over time. More than half the people who were in the top one percent in 1996 were no longer there in 2005.

This is hardly surprising when you consider that their incomes were going down while there was widespread hysteria over the belief that their incomes were going up.

Empirical studies that follow income brackets over time repeatedly reach opposite conclusions from studies that follow individuals. But people in the media, in politics and even in academia, cite statistics about income brackets as if they are discussing what happens to actual human beings over time.

All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.

For example the New York Times crusaded for government-provided prenatal care, citing the fact that black mothers had prenatal care less often than white mothers -- and that there were higher rates of infant mortality among blacks.

But was correlation causation? American women of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino ancestry also had less prenatal care than whites -- and lower rates of infant mortality than either blacks or whites.

When statistics showed that black applicants for conventional mortgage loans were turned down at twice the rate for white applicants, the media went ballistic crying racial discrimination. But whites were turned down almost twice as often as Asian Americans -- and no one thinks that is racial discrimination.

Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is. 

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/01/21/fact-free_liberals_121302.html#ixzz2r2rHvjxE 

What If Fetuses Do Feel Pain?

What If Fetuses Do Feel Pain?

Fetal Pain, Maternal Health, And The Supreme Court

By John C. Eastman

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The Supreme Court has in recent years taken great pains to require that execution of criminals who have committed the most heinous of crimes be done as painlessly as possible.  In almost every State that continues to utilize the death penalty as the ultimate punishment, a dose of sodium pentathol is administered first, rendering the convict unconscious so that the actual death-inducing drugs in the common three-drug cocktail do not cause any pain.

No such drugs are administered to an unborn child before a late-term abortion, yet new scientific evidence is pointing to the very real possibility that a fetus feels pain perhaps as early as 16 or 18 weeks gestational age.  One need only read the Supreme Court’s own descriptions of the common “skull-crushing” and “limb-ripping” procedures used beyond the first trimester to realize how horrific the pain must be, if this new scientific evidence proves true.

Other scientific evidence is demonstrating that the risk to maternal health increases exponentially with each passing week later in the pregnancy.

Confronted with this evidence, thirteen states have since 2010 passed laws restricting abortions after 20 weeks to those necessary to prevent death or serious health risks to the mother.  Although abortion advocates have claimed that these laws are “blatantly unconstitutional” because they apply to pre-viability abortions, they have deliberately not challenged the laws in federal circuit court jurisdictions thought likely to uphold the laws.  Nebraska’s first-of-the-kind statute adopted in 2010 remains in effect, for example.  Texas’s statute, adopted over the much ballyhooed filibuster by State Senator Wendy Davis in 2013, likewise remains in effect (the lawsuit brought against that law did not challenge the 20-week restriction).  As one news account noted with respect to the Texas litigation, there was “a strategic reason to avoid challenging that [20-week] ban…. [A] Texas challenge would go to the conservative Fifth Circuit. Not only would that court potentially uphold the law … , the combination of decisions would create a split in the circuits that would make the Supreme Court likelier to hear it.”

But abortion advocates did challenge the 20-week restriction adopted by Arizona.  Arizona is in the Ninth Circuit, which leans decidedly the other direction from the Fifth and Eighth Circuits.  Although the federal trial court upheld the Arizona statute based on the undisputed evidence of fetal pain and increased maternal health risk, the Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that the statute was per se unconstitutional because it restricted abortion prior to fetal viability.  The Supreme Court itself had in 2007 upheld a partial birth abortion ban that admittedly restricted some pre-viability abortions, but the Ninth Circuit held that the viability line nevertheless remained sacrosanct.  Arizona petitioned the Supreme Court for review, but its petition was denied on Monday of this week.

Why are these cases important, and why will the Supreme Court eventually have to confront the issues presented by them?  Well, the evidence that the risk to the health of the mother increases exponentially with every passing week for abortions late in the pregnancy should give pause to any but the most doctrinaire advocates of abortion on demand.  And the evidence that an unborn child in utero feels pain really gives lie to the claim, oft-repeated since Roe v. Wade was decided 41 years ago, that there is no child there, only tissue or a clump of cells.  The science is forcing our society to grapple with the fundamental immorality of abortion on demand that was unleashed by Roe and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton.

Today, the United States is one of only four nations in the world that allows for abortion on demand at any time during pregnancy.  We’re in the company of those great paragons of moral virtue and human rights, North Korea and China.  But the States continue to press the issue because they recognize what the Supreme Court inRoe seems to have forgotten—government has a deep moral obligation to protect the most vulnerable among us.  One of the judges on the Ninth Circuit panel suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that perhaps the states should require that anesthetics be administered to an unborn child in the womb before an abortion can be performed on it.  Such a rule would at least allow the unborn child to escape the pain that the gruesome techniques of late-term abortion would otherwise inflict on him or her.  But it cannot anesthetize the rest of us to the gruesome tragedy of late-term abortion, at least not as long as there is any measure of human decency left among us.

Dr. John C. Eastman, the Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law, is the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, in which capacity he served as lead counsel for Arizona in Horne v. Isaacson.

How Government Kills Jobs

How Democrats Kill Jobs

By Richard Epstein - January 15, 2014

The latest government labor report indicates that job growth has slowed once again. It is now at a three-year low, with only an estimated 74,000 new jobs added this past month. To be sure, the nominal unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent, but as experts on both the left and the right have noted, the only reason for this “improvement” is the decline of labor force participation, which is at the lowest level since 1978, with little prospect of any short-term improvement.

The Economic Logic of Supply and Demand

One might think that these figures would be taken as evidence that a radical change in course is needed to boost labor market participation. The grounds for that revision rest on a straightforward application of the fundamental economic law of demand: As the cost of labor increases, the demand for labor will decrease. There are, of course, empirical disputes as to just how rapidly wage increases will reduce that demand for labor. 

The federal government has apparently (and foolishly) assumed that these effects will be small, and that the unemployed can somehow be better helped by government interventions into the labor markets. However, only a free market in labor is able to balance changes in both supply and demand, so as to reduce the incidence of unemployment. Government efforts to impose various minimum wages will, happily, have little adverse effect if the market wage is greater than the government mandate. But the same form of increase could have devastating effects on labor markets when the required wage is set too high relative to market wages. The number of workers eager to take jobs at these higher levels will be great, but the number of jobs available at that wage level will shrink. Unemployment levels will increase, and working off the books could increase.

The correct policy choice is strong deregulation of labor markets, which will spur higher labor market participation, albeit at somewhat lower wages. But once people get into the labor force, they can hone their skills in ways that will allow them to command higher wages. Government mandates can never lead to sustainable wage increases. Higher levels of labor productivity can. And this critique of minimum wage laws is equally applicable to other labor market interventions, including overtime rules, family leave statutes, mandatory collective bargaining, and mandated healthcare benefits that likewise distort labor markets.

It is therefore disheartening to observe that the dismal failures in the current labor market have led to renewed calls for further government intervention at both the federal and state levels. More specifically, progressives are calling for a two-pronged program that couples increased unemployment benefits with increased worker protections on all these key fronts. This agenda will only deepen the current malaise.

The Living Wage Comes to de Blasio’s New York

The futility of these policies was made evident by two stories, which appeared side by side in the New York Times last week. The first of these stories carries the headline “After Winning a Raise, 175 Workers At a Queens Casino Lose Their Jobs.” That result would never have happened if the workers had won their raises by demonstrating higher levels of productivity to their employer, The Resorts World Casino. Instead, these wage increases were dictated by a labor arbitrator who doubled the base wages for workers in the casino under the living wage arrangement that he imposed on the firm.

No one should be thrilled that restaurant workers have to settle for wages of $5 per hour plus tips. But a steady job at that level is better than no job at the $12 base pay ordered by the arbitrator. The casino sought to raise food prices to compensate for the increased costs, but the law of demand applies to consumers as well. In hard times, they won’t stand for the increased prices, so the casino closed a food operation that could only operate at a loss, leaving 175 union members to scramble for jobs.

This sobering reality has not made the slightest impression on Mayor Bill de Blasio, who inserted himself strongly into the decision of the New York City Council to elect Melissa Mark-Viverito as its Speaker. Ms. Mark-Viverito served as a top labor union organizer in the healthcare industry before she joined the City Council in 2005, and her defiant acceptance speech echoed the long-term sentiments of de Blasio in seeking greater justice and equality for all New Yorkers. She pushed an agenda that will lead to further debacles in the mold of Resorts World Casino.

At this juncture, there can be no doubt that the control of the City Council has passed from more traditional Democrats, who showed commendable awareness of the downside of aggressive labor market intervention, to firebrands who think that they can help their constituents by initiating legislative warfare against the business interests whose health is essential to job creation in New York City.

The dominant force behind Ms. Mark-Viverito’s rise to power was the Working Families Party, so we can be sure that all restraint has been cast to the wind. The WFP is headed by a shrewd activist and union organizer Dan Cantor, who champions massive government interference in labor and housing markets in New York City. The WFP aggressive agenda calls for the living wage laws on projects that receive City funding, which will translate into fewer projects that the City will be able to afford.

For folks like Dan Cantor and his allies, demand curves do not slope downward, so in their minds the greater burdens on employers will result in simple wealth transfers to workers, without any adverse collateral effects whatsoever, including loss of jobs. That short-sighted thinking is sure to have adverse effects on the economic prospects of New York City. Existing employers may not abandon the City entirely, but they will surely cut back on their operations wherever possible by locating key portions of their businesses in more hospitable jurisdictions. Other investors who might have thought about coming to New York are more likely to look elsewhere. The mindless jubilation of the New York City Council is likely to be curtailed once these dim realities set in.

Congressional Mischief

The economic naiveté in New York City does not stand alone. The same pressures are at work at the federal level as well, where the bad employment numbers have been used to justify further federal intervention into labor markets. A recent angry New York Times editorial is entitled “No Jobs, No Benefits, and Lousy Pay.” As an accurate reflection of the state of the U.S. economy, the title should lead the Times to reconsider the policies that it has long defended in the face of their obvious failure. No such luck: The Times is determined to double-down on policies that have already failed.

It is strongly in favor of the use of long-term unemployment benefits to cushion the blow to those who are unemployed. But it never asks the hard questions about the potential downsides of these programs. This initiative creates an incentive for others to cut back on their search for new jobs. At best, it is just not certain which way the causality runs. Do unemployment benefits create the very risk of long-term unemployment that they are intended to respond to? Do the taxes that are needed to fund these benefits take resources out of the private sector, which helped to drag the rate of job creation to its current low levels?

The same can be said about the Times’ support for sharp increases in the minimum wage laws, which are based on the dubious grounds that the minimum wage historically stood at half the average wages, not the third of averages wages ($7.25 to $20.10) that it stands at today. But the Times offers no explanation as to why that historical ratio supplies the correct normative benchmark for thinking about labor regulation. The closer the minimum wage gets to average wages, the greater its distortions on market activity. Moreover, these distortions will have synergistic interactions with other forms of labor regulation, including the proposals for mandated sick leave with pay, which is high on the WFP’s agenda for New York City. In combination, such policies are likely to further aggravate the effects of government intervention.

That point is, however, totally lost on Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, which is a faithful backer of additional interference in labor markets. Writing in the Times, he claims that it is now time to expand the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 so that it covers a higher percentage of salaried workers. Once again, the historical averages are thought to supply the proper benchmark, and Eisenbrey of course has no trouble establishing that relative to inflation, fewer salaried workers are now exempted from overtime protections, which he regards as a key feature of the labor markets. To be sure, Eisenbrey recognizes that this new turn of the regulatory screw could deter employers from asking workers to work overtime. But he regards that shift as commendable because it could lead in his view to the creation of new jobs to fill the excess demand, which is in line with the views of the 1938 New Deal champions of the bill.

But it is all an exercise in wishful thinking, for there are many other scenarios that could take hold once the overtime limits are done. Eisenbrey does not ask whether it would be exceedingly difficult to add new workers to the mix if there is no place for them to work, whether the cost of additional training makes this option prohibitive, whether the new workers will need to receive costly certifications to take their new positions, or whether the short-term requirements of additional labor makes it unwise to add on workers.

Once these possibilities are on the table, it is clear the rosy predictions of the New Deal managers ignore a range of unpleasant possibilities that could follow from the tightening of overtime rules. For example, some current workers could be sacked from their positions and replaced by a smaller number of higher-salaried workers who are still exempt from these overtime restrictions. Or the business could decide to reduce the scale of operations, costing other workers jobs, because it cannot turn at existing levels of operation once the new restrictions are imposed.

The Better Way: Deregulation

It is just fantasy to think that the addition of any new constraint to labor markets will make matters better than they are. Efforts to make workers better off by making employers worse off will not have their desired effect. It is of course easy to take employers down a notch. But the second half of the program is far harder to implement, given that employers have incentives to minimize their losses from regulation, and will do what it takes to avert the adverse effect of new external constraints.

Labor markets are no different from other markets. They work because they create win/win relationships. In contrast, the government’s regulatory efforts to create win/lose relations will not work. What those efforts will get are the lose/lose scenarios that have been the bitter fruit of recent labor market regulations. 

This article is reprinted from Defining Ideas, a journal of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.