Socialism for the Uninformed

By Thomas Sowell
May 31, 2016

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.

With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.

The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist "exploitation," shouldn't it?

But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts -- such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.
 
Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.

When Senator Sanders cries, "The system is rigged!" no one asks, "Just what specifically does that mean?" or "What facts do you have to back that up?"

In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that.

But the very idea of subjecting their pet notions to the test of hard facts will probably not even occur to those who are cheering for socialism and for other bright ideas of the political left.

How many of the people who are demanding an increase in the minimum wage have ever bothered to check what actually happens when higher minimum wages are imposed? More often they just assume what is assumed by like-minded peers -- sometimes known as "everybody," with their assumptions being what "everybody knows."

Back in 1948, when inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage established a decade earlier, the unemployment rate among 16-17-year-old black males was under 10 percent. But after the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation, the unemployment rate for black males that age was never under 30 percent for more than 20 consecutive years, from 1971 through 1994. In many of those years, the unemployment rate for black youngsters that age exceeded 40 percent and, for a couple of years, it exceeded 50 percent.

The damage is even greater than these statistics might suggest. Most low-wage jobs are entry-level jobs that young people move up out of, after acquiring work experience and a track record that makes them eligible for better jobs. But you can't move up the ladder if you don't get on the ladder.

The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the signs of today's dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to think that the cost of their education should -- and will -- be paid by raising taxes on "the rich."

Here again, just a little check of the facts would reveal that higher tax rates on upper-income earners do not automatically translate into more tax revenue coming in to the government. Often high tax rates have led to less revenue than lower tax rates.

In a globalized economy, high tax rates may just lead investors to invest in other countries with lower tax rates. That means that jobs created by those investments will be overseas.

None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think -- and that is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their students to do.

Gawker + Thiel + Free Speech

The Liberal Case Against Peter Thiel Is The Worst Kind Of Hypocrisy
Hysteria over the Gawker suit is unconvincing— especially when you consider who’s leading the charge.
May 26, 2016 By David Harsanyi

We recently discovered that Peter Thiel, libertarian (?) billionaire co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, has been bankrolling lawsuits against the gossip site Gawker.

Now, as someone who considers himself a near-absolutist on free speech, I’m open to hearing arguments for why we need tort reform in these sorts of cases or why Hulk Hogan’s suit undermines free expression. But so far, the media’s hysteria about Thiel’s third-party legal funding has been unconvincing — especially when we consider who’s making the arguments.

And after wading through the thousands of angst-ridden words, I noticed that the case mostly boils down to two objections: Thiel’s motivations and Thiel’s money. And when I say Thiel, I mean Thiel. There is little anxiety over third-party funding when we’re talking about the giant apparatus the Left uses to implement their own will via the courts. Even more hypocritical is the fact that many of the same people so distressed about the future of sex tapes regularly advocate for policies that would allow the state to inhibit political speech.

Ezra Klein, for instance, writes that what’s “endangering Gawker is Thiel’s endless resources, and his apparently limitless appetite for revenge. Those tools can be used by anyone with enough money, against any media target they choose, for any slight they perceive.”

Josh Marshall says it’s a “Huge, Huge Deal,” and writes, “We don’t have to go any further than Donald Trump to know that the incredibly rich often use frivolous litigation to intimidate critics and bludgeon enemies.”

Thiel is “reinventing the concept of philanthropy so as to include weapons-grade attacks on America’s free press,” writes Felix Salmon, who goes onto say that Thiel’s success has essentially given other billionaires a blueprint on how to put critics out of business. Slate says Thiel is the bully here.

Which would all be very upsetting if true.

There’s a question that should not be lost in this debate: is it an invasion of privacy to make public a tape—not a news story about a sexual indiscretion or a snapped picture of a sexual indiscretion in some public place, but a movie of a person engaged in sex in private—without the consent of the person in it? In other words, was this lawsuit really “frivolous?” Not according to a judge. Not according to the jury that awarded Hogan more than $100 million. And not according to a circuit court judge that upheld that verdict.

There’s no doubt the judicial system has its share of ridiculous decisions, frivolous lawsuits and hyper-litigious troublemakers. So what precedent has Thiel really set? Well, we’ve probably seen the end of sites posting private sex tapes without permission. If you’re upset about the amount Gawker is on the hook for, let’s talk about capping awards. But the contention that Thiel is abusing the system because of a “limitless appetite” for revenge would be a lot stronger if he hadn’t actually won the case.

Now, whether Thiel was compelled to engage in this crusade because he was “slighted” by Gawker is immaterial. Some rich people are motivated to act because they are slighted, others because of ideology, or empathy or hate, or because there’s a media outlet that believes it’s okay to run sex tapes of people as long as they’re not under the age of four. So what?

Moreover, if Thiel’s motivation were a cause liberal pundits felt some moral or ideological affinity towards, they would be cheering him on. Vox asserts that Thiel “sees his lawsuit as a public-spirited attempt to enforce norms of decency and respect for personal privacy.” Or, in other words, he uses the judicial system the same way liberals have for decades when trying to enforce their own norms—including ones on abortion rights, gay marriage, and basically everything else they value.

Actually, every contemporary major lawsuit of any political consequence has probably been funded in some way by a third party. If Thiel is a problem, so is the pro bono legal work of wealthy lawyers who donate their time and resources to causes that move them. So is contingent litigation. So are class-action lawsuits. So is every advocacy legal group. Start with the ACLU, which is backed by hundreds of One Percenters and works to enforce its own norms of “decency and respect” when it comes boys’ and girls’ bathrooms and leads crusades to do away with the Free Exercise Clause.

By the way, Nick Denton is also a One Percenter. So are the owners of the New York Times and every other major media outlet you can think of. These One Percenters can just as easily destroy lives and abuse their powerful position and hire teams of lawyers. Sometimes the only way to fight back is to collectively fund an effort or find a third-party benefactor.

If press outlets feel that the sex tape case is worthy of a First Amendment fight, they could easily match Thiel’s $10 million investment. Otherwise, what do these critics propose? Should we pass a law capping the amount of funding people with the last names “Thiel” and “Koch” can provide for lawsuits? Ban billionaires from participating in the legal system?

But the most infuriating hypocrisy of the entire Thiel kerfuffle is that many of those wringing their hands have no problem with the overall deteriorating attitude regarding free expression on the Left. Some, in fact, actively argue for inhibiting free speech. I’m not only talking about the rampant illiberalism we see at institutions of higher learning or the abuse of government officials who are attempting to punish Americans who are skeptical of liberal doctrine. Some of them would be perfectly content handing over far broader and more consequential powers of censorship to the state, allowing government to literally ban movies and books with political messages. That includes the institutional position at almost every liberal publication lamenting the actions of Peter Thiel.

Ben Stein: Words of Wisdom

Ben Stein’s Diary
Playing the Teacher in Front of a Classroom
Ben Stein



 

May 17, 2016

The best part about it is that it’s not acting.

In my life, aside from my very private moments with my wife and my dogs, the happiest moments of my existence have been in front of a classroom.

When I contemplate my roughly 71 years on this planet, I had many great times watching cartoons with my son and my wife and getting awards and walking in the redwoods of Santa Cruz, looking out my window in Sandpoint at the stupefying blue, red, yellow, and grey daybreak. Zooming along the lake in my Cobalt, with the Stars and Stripes fluttering on the rear of the boat and my wifey’s perfect profile to my left. I can recall happy times with my Pop at the White House Mess, sharing our secrets while John Dean plotted his next move nearby. I can have a great time any moment I step into my pool and start swimming the world’s laziest backstroke while the sun beats through the palms and jets ply the air overhead with their silvery magic. I remember my mother offering me grapes as I slept.

When I awaken and look at my wife and the dogs, I cannot believe how blessed I am. Just to look at the American flag over my bed and the map of the USA in my living room is to feel the red, white, and blue glory of living in the most spectacular edifice of all eternity.

But it has been in front of a classroom that I have had my greatest joy.

In 1970, in Anti-Trust Law at Yale, I commandeered the class and made our bully of a teacher (but a super smart guy) leave the room and quit teaching: all because I threatened to take my clothes off and recite the names of the Vietnam War dead if he didn’t stop his game playing.

In 1973, I was an adjunct teacher of film at American University at Ward Circle in my home town of DC. It was my third semester teaching there in the evenings after harrowing days practicing trial law. I had the most popular class ever in the history of AU up until then: 360 students for the superficially easiest elective in the world. It was called “Film and Revolution!”

The first day of class, when I entered the room and strode up to the podium, at about 150 pounds, long hair, mustache, menacing potent ’62 Red Corvette in the parking lot, Buick repair jacket on, the whole room erupted in sustained, standing cheering.

They knew I was their pal and that we would have a great time. And the class was not at all easy at in fact. The kids had to use Socratic method techniques to dissect what the secret motives of the writers were in terms of wishes for social change.

(This led to my book: The View From Sunset Boulevard — about the political attitudes of the TV writing aristocracy and how those views gave us the distinctly red-tinged messages of prime time. But that was later. In ’72 and ’73 I was talking about movies.)

Your humble servant had a rush of excitement every day I taught that class. The kids loved me and I loved them.

Soon, I went on to teach at UC, Santa Cruz. It was fabulous, too, although not like AU. But the views from my classroom were incredible. Then to teach at Pepperdine, also great stuff, an even better view, but nothing like my magical mystery tour at the Ward Circle Building at AU.

Then, on about November 16, 1985, came the day that altered my life forever: Playing a teacher in a movie called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I did a long speech about the economy off the cuff and the young extras playing high school students applauded and whistled when I was done.

Matthew Broderick asked me if I did theater on Broadway. Michael Chinich and John Hughes told me I would be a star.

Now, I travel about the nation speaking about the economy, the demise of certain ethnic and demographic groups, politics, and investing. It’s not AU in 1973, but it’s still paradise.

I love to speak and by now, with 71 years over my belt (not under my belt… I am too fat for that), I have a bit to say, and if I were asked to speak at a college (as I actually often am), this is what I would say to graduates:

WE ALL WANT TO BE ABLE TO LOOK BACK at our lives when we are my age and say we have been successful. But what is successful? It certainly has something to do with money. Shortages of money are simply horrifying. Fear of financial insecurity is awful. So before anything else, success requires at least a modicum of financial security, obtained in a respectable way.

But once we are past that, success requires that we spend our lives doing what we like to do: in a free society, one of the best possibilities is to do not what your parents expect you to do, not what the school guidance counselor tells you to do, but what you enjoy doing.

My old pal and inspiration, Warren E. Buffett, says (if I may boil it down) that he has become the richest man in the world or one of the richest not because he chose a highly paid field that he hated, but because he happened to love a field that paid astoundingly well: allocating capital.

When I worked on Wall Street, I hated every moment of it (although I love finance people once they are away from New York). Buffett “tap dances to work,” as he likes to say. That’s the way to make a life.

My dear young friend, L., just graduated from a prestige university. She is going to work at improving the lives of poor people in our nation’s capital. Some people in her life told her she was wasting her education working in that vineyard. I disagree. I think she’ll do great things there and she’ll be doing what she loves. That’s what makes you succeed — making your work your play or maybe making your play your work.

That last comes from one of the smartest men I have ever met, the mega producer, Norman Lear. (I know I have not quoted it exactly right.) He made what he enjoyed doing — weaving tales of meaning and humor — into a super remunerative career.

It’s really a matter of definition. As I see it, we all have only one life to live. If we spend it doing work we hate, we have made a serious mistake. If we spend it doing work we barely tolerate, we have made a mistake.

What good does it do to have money, even a meaningful amount of money, if you have spent your one and only life doing work that does not thrill you?

So, make a living — but also make a life.

I also respectfully advise that young people have a spiritual basis for their lives — and that such spiritual basis involve doing good for others. As I have grown older I see that a selfish life spent without having a high priority for helping others is a waste of life. The knowledge that you are sharing your humanity and your limited span on this planet with those in need gives you self-esteem in even the darkest hours.

This goes hand in hand with my own certain conviction that there is a Higher Power which controls the universe. It’s not evolution and it’s not chance. It’s God and when He does some things and lets other horrible events happen, when there are death camps and child rapes and gulags and trench warfare and killing fields, we have to wonder what kind of God He is. But I am certain that the laws of physics and motion and gravity did not happen by themselves, that Someone designed them. I don’t think that someone was Marx or a pit boss in some cosmic gambling house.

Life is a heavy burden. Ask and then allow God to share it.

Have gratitude on your plate night and day and sup heartily. We in America, especially the young, have lives that even the wealthiest people two centuries ago could not imagine. We have air conditioning and modern medicine and automobiles and jet travel. We have free worldwide instantaneous communication.

But mostly, we have freedom under law. We have equality before the law. We have the liberty to do what we want with our lives day by day and have that liberty protected — not repressed — by the government.

We have a free capitalist system that allows everyone who saves to become a part owner in the mighty American capitalist engine, even the super mighty worldwide industrial machine. “Every man a King,” said Huey Long of Louisiana. That was a joke, but “Every man a capitalist” is real and true and has saved many a life.

Investing early and often, in a diversified basket of corporate ownership, making yourselves partners with the likes of Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg and harnessing the genius of the system of capitalism — that’s a miraculous freedom all too often derided by the young. But those who pay attention to what is real instead of to fantasies of paranoia will reap immense rewards as the years go by. The freedom to invest is a boon to mankind.

But gratitude in general is a gift for the man or woman who is grateful as well as to the person to whom he is grateful. Make use of that truly free and indispensable gift.

There is much more to say: Be thrifty. Don’t get high as a matter of course. Don’t be afraid to take on powerful opponents.

Respect innocent life, no matter how politically unpopular it is. The power elites and the media will hate you for it, but respect for the most innocent life among us is to be worn as a badge of honor.

Life in America for most of us is great. Let’s spend time enjoying ourselves making it even better for others whose lives are not great. Let’s do it in freedom and gratitude, and let’s do it now. Class dismissed.

'Keeping our Jobs' Holds America Back

I Want a President Who Can Teach Us to Accept (Celebrate!) Capitalism

By Christopher Chantrill

In last week’s foreign policy speech Donald Trump had this to say about jobs:

NAFTA, as an example, has been a total disaster for the U.S. and has emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs. Never again. Only the reverse will happen. We will keep our jobs and bring in new ones. Their [sic] will be consequences for companies that leave the U.S. only to exploit it later.

Okay, I get it: you are running for president, Mr. Trump, and I get that you can’t say that, of course, NAFTA has hurt some people, because after all capitalism is creative destruction, but on balance NAFTA has benefited the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. And I know that you can’t tell the American people that no job is forever, because no technology, no market, no corporation, no nothing is forever. The last thing a president is allowed to do is tell us that life is tough and we just have to pick ourselves up and try something else when the market leaves us high and dry.

People insist on thinking that capitalism is accumulation. I wrote a long blog series on that Frenchie, Thomas Piketty and his often bought but seldom read Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century, where he makes the stupid point that the return on capital is greater than the growth rate. Of course it is. You can make money on lending money to another guy so he can buy a diamond for his mistress, and it does nothing for growth.

Capitalism is not about accumulating gold coins in a sack by stealing bread from the poor; it is about innovation. According to George Gilder it is surprise; according to Deirdre McCloskey it is “trade-tested betterment.” And the net result of innovation, trade-tested betterment, and surprise over the last 200 years has been an increase in per-capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day. That’s on top of an increase in world population from about 1 billion to 7 billion humans. There has been nothing like it, ever.

But the dirty little secret of capitalism is that it can only work its magic and raise up the poor from indigence if you let it destroy the commanding heights of today’s economy with surprise, with innovation, with trade-tested betterment.

Never mind all those hand-loom weavers thrown out of work by power looms. What about the keypunch operators of 1970 thrown out of work by floppy disks? What about the guys that used to earn good money calculating paper spreadsheets using ten-key adders? In the 1970s, I remember my employer buying a 50 megabyte disk drive that was the size of a washing machine and cost $15,000 or more. Today I have a 32GB chip in my $100 Android smartphone that starts playing my tunes the moment I start my car. Bully for me, but what about all those skilled disk-drive workers along Route 128 in Boston?

Usually, writes Joel Mokyr in The Gifts of Athena, the established interests down the ages have managed to smother in its cradle any innovation or surprise or trade-tested betterment that threatened their good life, and so for century after century things went on in the good old ways for the established interests and nothing changed. The astonishing thing is that the last 200 years has allowed any technological change to disrupt the establishment and its comforts.

But I have a dream, that one day this planet will have a cultural and political elite that accepts capitalism’s constant innovation and surprise and trade-tested betterment as the logical, epistemological and moral foundation of the raising up of the poor. And they would not be too shy to remold our culture, with traditional elite condescension and conceit, to ease the torments of change and teach the American people to regard with acceptance, rather than distemper, the disruptive changes that might afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

Instead we have a vile and contemptible “clerisy” of thinkers, popularizers, activists, and politicians that cruelly scratch the wounds of the afflicted. They marinate them in their tribal hatreds, trap them in dependency, tax and their wages and then play the Lady Bountiful giving it back years later, and teach them to hate the culture that has raised them, or will raise their children, out of Malthusian oblivion.

It’s great that Donald Trump wants to Make America Great Again. But what made America great was that for a season, the elite lacked the power to “keep our jobs” against some nobody with a crazy idea to demolish the status quo and surprise the world with an unlooked for invention, a trade-tested betterment, and the result was the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years.

And it really is about time that presidential candidates could dare to tell us that.

Democrats are Increasingly the Anti-Science Party

Curt Schilling the Science Guy
From climate change to restrooms, Democrats are increasingly the anti-science party.


By
William McGurn April 25, 2016 6:42 p.m. ET

Let us stipulate that ESPN, as a private institution, was entirely within its rights to have sacked Curt Schilling for his combative Facebook post on the continuing national saga that is North Carolina restrooms. Let’s stipulate too that the way the former Red Sox pitcher advanced his case—sharing a meme featuring a grotesque fat man in a blonde wig pretending to be a woman—was not the line of argument that, say, William F. Buckley would have chosen.

But let us also note the irony. Mr. Schilling’s main contention—“a man is a man no matter what they call themselves”—is supported by DNA and those pesky X and Y chromosomes. In short, in this fight between science and authority, Mr. Schilling is in the amusing position of being the Galileo, with ESPN filling in for the Holy Office.

Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, puts it this way: “Curt Schilling is of course correct with the science in saying that claiming to be a woman when you have the chromosomal and anatomical structures of a man does not make you such. You’re still a man no matter what you think or how you dress.”

It’s an interesting detail that has gone largely unaddressed since Mr. Schilling delivered his knuckleball. Nor is it hard to see why. For it contradicts the dominant narrative in which Democrats take their positions from a clear-eyed look at the science while Republicans are blinded by their religious, social and economic orthodoxies.

This was the trope Barack Obama invoked in his maiden inaugural address, when he promised to “restore science to its rightful place.” Well, the American people have now had almost eight years of it. Turns out that restoring-science-to-its-rightful-place comes with its own set of dogmas and orthodoxies.

It’s not just letting men into women’s restrooms, either. On a host of issues, upholding the progressive catechism these days apparently requires seeking out and punishing heretics too.

Start with climate change. It may well be, as Barack Obama declared in Paris in December, when he committed the U.S. to the global war on temperature, that “99.5 percent of scientists and experts” believe man-made climate change a fact and that “we have to do something about it.” His eventual presidential successor, he suggested, must never question this consensus.

Is there anything more inimical to the spirit of science than the idea of squelching further inquiry, freezing our existing understanding in place and silencing opposition? Because this is precisely what such phrases as “settled science” or “scientific consensus” are designed to do.

Indeed, in this climate (pun intended), we now have moves to criminalize scientific dissent. Only last month, a collection of state attorneys general met with activists to discuss ways to go after Exxon for its alleged heterodoxy on global warming.

Which hints at the real game, which is less about the earth’s warming than the hope that green enthusiasms can be used to push through a progressive economic and regulatory agenda with few questions asked. As Ottmar Edenhofer, the then co-chairman of Working Group III of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, put it a few years back: “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

Or take abortion. In progressive dogma, the right to abort a fetus is not only settled science but settled law, which means you’re not only not allowed to question it, you must not stray from the approved vocabulary.

For example, if a couple is happy about a pregnancy, the two are perfectly free to share sonograms with friends and relatives and celebrate the pending arrival of their unborn child. But if this child is to be aborted, any talk of “person” or “child” becomes verboten, lest folks get too accurate an idea of what is happening.

Alas, even the truest believers slip up. So it was earlier this month on NBC’s “Meet the Press” when Hillary Clinton—who has in this election dumped the word “rare” from the earlier “safe, legal, and rare” Clinton formula on abortion—referred to the “unborn person” as having no constitutional rights.

Pro-lifers condemned her, as expected. As perhaps unexpected, she was also attacked by her pro-choice allies for uttering the words “unborn person.” Whatever position one takes on abortion, to say that the fetus is a person if the mother wants it and it’s not if she doesn’t is not science. It’s spin.

Each election season, the American people are treated to Republican candidates who fumble badly when challenged on, say, evolution or abortion. Fair enough. But the president and his allies also have orthodoxies that limit their openness to free inquiry and objective reality. The difference is these go largely unchallenged outside the conservative press.

Wouldn’t it be entertaining if someone would ask President Obama if Curt Schilling is right or wrong about the science?

Hypocrisy - Clinton Foundation Pays Female Executives 38 Percent Less Than Male Counterparts

 Just to be clear, pointing to a gap in total 'female vs. male' numbers and claiming discrimination isn't a legitimate way to evaluate compensation by gender.  Unfortunately, it's what 'fair pay' advocates do all the time, but apparently they fail to apply their biased standard to their own organizations.

Clinton Foundation Pays Female Executives 38 Percent Less Than Male Counterparts

Guy Benson | Apr 14, 2016

The "of course" piece of that headline is, needless to say, a reference to the many other "pay gap" violations of which Hillary Clinton has been guilty over the years. Under the Democrats' clumsy calculations, she has under-paid women in her Senate office and at her State Department. The Daily Caller documents the latest transgression. Why must the Clinton Foundation wage this brutal, mean-spirited war on women? Are they unsatisfied with their separate war on transparency and good government? Questions abound. Details:

Male executives at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation earn 38 percent more than women executives, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of the foundation’s latest IRS tax filings. The foundation’s 2013 IRS form 990 reveals that nearly three times as many men as women occupy the executive suites at the Little Rock, Arkansas-based foundation. On average, top male executives at the foundation earn $109,000 more than the top female executives with positions in the C-suite.

The piece goes on to note that Mrs. Clinton was out beating the drums on this very "issue" earlier in the week, highlighting the fact that the presumptive Democratic nominee timed her campaign launch last year to coincide with the annual made-for-politics "equal pay day:"

Clinton has called for a multi-pronged effort to close the gap, starting by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would add some teeth to the 50-year-old Equal Pay Act by preventing employers from retaliating against workers who share wage information. She’s also called for a higher federal minimum wage and new laws requiring employers to provide paid family and medical leave (she and her opponent Bernie Sanders agree on that front). “I feel like [equal pay] is something that’s long overdue but I know we’ve got to keep moving forward,” Clinton said. Equal Pay day this year falls on the one-year anniversary of the launch of Clinton’s presidential campaign. At the kickoff event held in New York City that day, Clinton promised to keep pay parity front and center in her bid for the Democratic nomination. “It is way past time to end the outrage of so many women still earning less than men on the job — and women of color often making even less,” she said. “This isn’t a women’s issue. It’s a family issue.”

As for Clinton's hypocrisy, Democrats will indignantly link to various fact-checkers who've "debunked" the numbers, explaining that the calculations involved are somewhat cherry-picked and fail to take important factors into account.  Which is exactly the point.  Lefties do precisely the same thing when they wield deeply misleading "X cents on the dollar" statistics as a cudgel to hammer Republicans who oppose their latest pointless, coercive government "solution" to a problem that they deliberately inflate with bogus numbers, derived from wildly simplistic math.  As we've documented in the past, the alleged 'pay gap' almost entirely vanishes when the data is analyzed in a thoughtful, nuanced way -- and that most of that gap is due to women's choices, as opposed to discrimination.  But because Democrats only apply nuance to themselves, Republicans can be forgiven for responding in kind and asking why the Clinton Foundation hates women, and not just as it relates to the mega-bucks it pulls in from undisclosed foreign donors and authoritarian regimes with terrible records on women's rights.  Should Hillary Clinton pay a political price for this two-faced nonsense?  Sure.  Will she?  In light of Donald Trump's extraordinarily horrendous ratings among female voters, it seems unlikely.  I'll leave you with this data point on married women, a demographic Republicans traditionally win.  Yeesh:

Equal Pay Day and the 23% gender pay gap myth

Some thoughts on Equal Pay Day and the 23% gender pay gap myth 

Mark J. Perry 

The American Association of University Women (AAUW), along with the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE), are major participants in the feminist propaganda machine that mobilizes its forces every April and engages in statistical misrepresentations to publicize the annual feminist holiday known as Equal Pay Day. Last April, AAUW executive director Linda D. Hallman sent a mass email that made this verifiably false statement (emphasis added):

Think about it: Women have to work almost four months longer than men do to earn the same amount of money for doing the same job. What’s more, we have to set aside a day each year just to call the nation’s attention to it.

Hallman’s statement is a statistical fairy tale because it’s based on the false assumption that women get paid 23% less than men for doing exactly the same work in the exact same occupations and careers, working side-by-side with men on the same job for the same organization, working the same number of hours per week, traveling the same amount of time for work obligations, with the same exact work experience and education, with exactly the same level of productivity, etc. In other words, the AAUW, NCPE, progressives, and gender activists falsely assume that employers all across America are using coupons like the one above to get a 23% wage discount for every woman they hire, and it’s that rampant, unjust and blatant gender discrimination that is the culprit behind the gender pay gap.

For example, Sen. Gary Peters (MI-D) said at this time last year that (emphasis mine): “Today, April 14th marks Equal Pay Day, the date by which women have made up for the wage discrimination they suffered during the previous year.” That’s complete statistical nonsense.
The reality is that you can only find a 23% gender pay gap by comparing raw, aggregate, unadjusted full-time median salaries, i.e. when you control for NOTHING that would help explain gender differences in salaries like:

1. Hours Worked: The average man working full-time worked almost two more hours per week in 2014 compared to the average woman, see my analysis here.

2. Type of Work: As I reported a few days ago, men represented 92.3% of workplace fatalities in 2014 (and the male share of job-related deaths has been consistently that high in every previous year) because men far outnumber women in the most dangerous, but higher-paying occupations like logging, mining and roofing that have the greatest probability of job-related injury or death. In contrast, women, more than men, show a demonstrated preference for lower risk occupations with greater workplace safety and comfort, and they are frequently willing to accept lower wages for the greater safety and reduced probability of work-related injury or death.

3. Marriage and Motherhood: a) single women who have never married earned nearly 94% of male earnings in 2014 (but that does not control for anything else like hours worked, age, experience, education, occupation, etc.); b) more women than men leave the labor force temporarily for child birth, child care and elder care, and c) women, especially working mothers, tend to value “family friendly” workplace policies more than men, according this Department of Labor study.

Most economic studies that control for all of those variables conclude that gender discrimination accounts for only a very small fraction of gender pay differences, and may not even be a statistically significant factor at all. For example, as Andrew Biggs and I pointed out in a 2014 WSJ op-ed:

In a comprehensive study that controlled for most of the relevant labor market variables simultaneously—such as that from economists June and Dave O’Neill for the American Enterprise Institute in 2012—nearly all of the 23% raw gender pay gap cited by the UUAW can be attributed to factors other than discrimination. The O’Neills conclude that, “labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% but may not be present at all.”

On Equal Pay Day, when groups like the AAUW and NCPE point to a 23% unadjusted gender pay gap and demand that the pay gap be completely closed, what they are really saying is that they want women to:

• Work longer hours on average like men do;
• Work in riskier, less safe occupations like logging and commercial fishing like men do where the chances of getting injured or killed are much greater;
• Work in more physically demanding occupations like farming, construction, roofing, logging and working on oil rigs, where they’d be working alongside men outside in 100 degree weather in the summer and below zero weather in the winter;
• Accept fewer jobs in family-friendly workplace environments like teaching elementary school that coincide with their children’s schedules (with summers off, etc.), and accept more jobs in less family-friendly workplace environments like being an over-the-road truck driver or being an oil field worker.
• Take less time off, or no time off, for child birth and child care to minimize their time away from the labor force that might affect their earnings.

Bottom Line: Those who publicize Equal Pay Day and demand that the unadjusted 23% pay gap be reduced to zero are unknowingly really advocating that men and women play completely interchangeable roles in the labor market and identical roles in their family responsibilities; and that’s an outcome I don’t think most women (or men) really want. As the Department of Labor concluded in 2009, “The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.” They also concluded that “the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action.”

As I concluded on my recent related post, once we adjust for all of the factors that contribute to the raw difference in pay by gender, Equal Pay Day actually probably fell close to December 31 of last year. Or maybe the first week of January…. but NOT the second week of April. Women should be embarrassed by the economic myth that is annually perpetuated on their behalf by Equal Pay Day, which suggests that gender discrimination in the labor market burdens them with 14 additional weeks of work to earn the same income as their male counterparts earned the previous year – when that’s not even remotely true.

Ask Hillary Clinton Why Abortion Is A ‘Difficult Decision’

Ask Hillary Clinton Why Abortion Is A ‘Difficult Decision’
When Hillary Clinton labels abortion ‘difficult,’ she concedes almost every argument of the pro-life movement.

By Hans Fiene
April 8, 2016

During Hillary Clinton’s recent appearance on ABC’s “The View,” co-host Paula Faris asked the presidential candidate about her assertion that an unborn person has no constitutional rights. Clinton, never missing an opportunity to proclaim her commitment to restriction-free abortion on demand, responded with the following words:

“Under our law that is the case, Paula. I support Roe versus Wade because I think it is an important — an important statement about the importance of a woman making this most difficult decision with consultation by whom she chooses: her doctor, her faith, her family. And under the law and under certainly that decision, that is the way we structure it.”

Clinton’s response was, of course, hardly surprising, as pro-choice politicians have spent a few decades labeling abortion a “difficult decision” to derail any conservative attempts to limit access to it, because everyone knows that government bureaucrats are woefully unqualified to make difficult decisions for you. Well, government bureaucrats are perfectly capable of deciding for you that providing flowers for a gay couple’s wedding doesn’t violate your religious beliefs, but everyone knows that once “difficult decisions” migrate from the heart down to the uterus, government bureaucrats can no longer be trusted.

Why Is Abortion a Difficult Decision?

What was also unsurprising about this exchange on “The View” was that Faris neglected to parse Clinton’s response. The “difficult decision” verbiage is, after all, rather par for the political course at this point, so it’s understandable that your average journalist wouldn’t try to discover something new hidden in a phrase that’s been tossed around approximately eleventy billion times since 1973.

Within the heart of that phrase dwells a monstrously self-defeating implication that ought to be obvious to any journalist striving for a modicum of objectivity.

But within the heart of that phrase dwells a monstrously self-defeating implication that ought to be obvious to any journalist striving for a modicum of objectivity. Therefore, as a challenge to any journalist desiring to cover the abortion issue fairly, I beg they ask Clinton or any other politician who tosses out the “abortion is a difficult decision” line the following question: Why is abortion a difficult decision?

After all, the difficulty spoken of here is obviously one of a moral nature, and most medical procedures are not steeped in moral difficulty. They may be difficult in the sense that you are afraid to undergo them, but they’re not difficult from a right versus wrong perspective. A woman may ask her priest to pray with her before undergoing an appendectomy out of fear, for example, but she’s not going to ask him to pray with her out of guilt for expelling the inflamed organ from her digestive system. Likewise, no woman lays awake the night before cancer treatment wondering if she’ll be guilty of a mortal sin for letting doctors kill her tumor with radiation.

So if abortion is just a medical procedure not substantially different from these procedures, why is it a difficult decision? If the thing that a woman is having removed from her body is just a clump of her own cells, less essential to her health than the tonsils or gall bladder she’s already had yanked out, what’s the big deal with removing some unwanted goo from her uterus?

Surely Hillary Clinton would find it silly if a woman broke down in tears telling her husband or pastor that she has an abscess molar and needs his help deciding whether it’s right for her to get it removed. So what makes abortion so different? Why is abortion a difficult decision?

It’s Difficult Because We Don’t Want to Kill People

The answer is obvious. Abortion is a difficult decision because this medical procedure results in a dead baby. Choosing to have an abortion is morally difficult because a woman has to weigh her desire not to give birth to a child with her desire not to kill the child that she’s already conceived. When a teenage girl is terrified of her parents’ anger and rejection, abortion is a heart-wrenching decision to consider because it promises to take away her fear, but only at the cost of ending the innocent life in her womb. When a young woman is filled with sorrow as she considers having to put her education or career on hold due to an unexpected pregnancy, abortion is a heavy thing to consider because, while it promises to give her back the life she wanted to make for herself, it also charges a price for that freedom that her conscience will never be able to pay off.

Defending the legality of abortion while acknowledging its moral indefensibility is ultimately an untenable position.

Quite simply, when Hillary Clinton labels abortion “difficult,” she concedes almost every argument of the pro-life movement—that life begins at conception, that abortion takes an innocent human life, that taking innocent human life is wrong, and that guilt is the natural result of sinning so greatly against our most vulnerable neighbor. The only pro-life argument Clinton refuses to concede, of course, is the conclusion—namely that, for the sake of both women and their unborn children, abortion should be illegal.

But as I’ve argued before, defending the legality of abortion while acknowledging its moral indefensibility is ultimately an untenable position, and those who are firmly committed to their respective sides in the abortion debate will not tolerate rhetoric that erodes their positions from the politicians who are supposed to be on their side, as evidenced by the response to Clinton’s original comments from many on the Left who recognize that there’s only so long you can concede that the unborn are persons before you can’t justify keeping it legal to tear their bodies apart in the womb.

Maybe Hillary Clinton Really Wants to Celebrate Abortion

So no matter where journalists stand on Roe v. Wade, it would benefit everyone for them to mine the words “abortion is a difficult decision,” that standard little phrase Clinton and others always use to justify abortion. The American people, after all, have the right to choose their next president, but we can only make an informed decision if journalists ask the questions we don’t have the opportunity to ask, and get the answers we desperately need.

We can only make an informed decision if journalists ask the questions we don’t have the opportunity to ask, and get the answers we desperately need.

So ask. “Why is abortion a difficult decision? Is it because abortion takes an innocent human life? Is that what you believe is happening?”

I’d be very interested in hearing Clinton’s response. Since she’s a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry, I’d imagine Clinton would initially hem and haw about these questions being above her pay grade before being told to adopt the more stable position that abortion is not something sad that we allow but something empowering that we celebrate, a position that would make it much easier for voters to understand her position on the issue and consider how well it represents their own.

But, then again, perhaps she’d surprise me. Perhaps if caught flat-footed on national television, perhaps if forced to see the implicit pro-life concessions in her phrasing without her handlers being able to whisper them away in her ear, Clinton could have the scales fall from her eyes and see that choosing to have an abortion is a difficult decision because the thing being aborted is a living, human child who deserves to be treated with dignity and love and doesn’t deserve to die simply for the crime of being inconvenient.

Perhaps in that moment, Clinton could see that the reason abortion fills women’s hearts with difficult emotions is because those women feel they have no option but to take a life that neither they nor God wants to see taken. Perhaps if asked to explain why abortion is morally problematic, Clinton’s devotion to scripted answers would give way to an overwhelming desire to be honest and she’d concede, “You know what, maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe if abortion is such a difficult decision, it shouldn’t be completely unrestricted. Maybe, as I did with gay marriage, I need to reevaluate my position.”

Granted, I know that expecting a career politician to have an ideological conversion on live television is rather foolish. But, just like an unborn person who has no constitutionally protected right to life in Clinton’s eyes, I can always dream.

Minimum Wage Activist Interview

Interesting interview with a $15 minimum wage activist. This is a great example of how the minimum wage discussion is totally divorced from logic, economics, and value delivery. The activist does not recognize or care that she is imposing costs on owners and customers and that forcing owners to pay more in wages than workers deliver in productivity will result in layoffs or automation.  A small group will be better off, but a much larger group will be worse off in terms of higher prices, fewer profits to reinvest in the business, and lost jobs.  In economic terms, a 'dead weight loss' results, and total value created is reduced.

I wish Neil had asked her how they arrived at $15 as the proper minimum wage. I guarantee she would have answered that is 'fair' or would provide a 'living wage' - her answer would have nothing to do with business economics or her delivering $15 worth of productivity.   

It's disappointing that workers are being misled in this way. They are being told this will be a great catalyst, that their increased spending power will grow the economy and everyone will benefit. Clearly, that's not how wages work. If it worked that way, then $15 is way too low - it should be $100/hour or more. When workers are (over)paid more than they produce (including higher-paid workers), that inefficiency is a drag on growth and actually constrains resources that would otherwise be used to expand business and create more jobs. 

All that has been accomplished here is to make a lucky few low-skilled workers marginally better off at the expense of their counterparts who now will be fired, replaced, or unable to take advantage of opportunities that don't exist because resources were wasted overpaying the lucky few.

It's already happening.

No, Bernie Sanders, Scandinavia is not a socialist utopia

No, Bernie Sanders, Scandinavia is not a socialist utopia


By Jeff Jacoby Globe Columnist October 15, 2015

When Bernie Sanders was asked during CNN’s Democratic presidential debate how a self-proclaimed socialist could hope to be elected to the White House, he gave the answer he usually gives: Socialism has been wonderful for the countries of Scandinavia, and America should emulate their example.

“We should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people,” Sanders said. When the moderator turned to Hillary Clinton, she agreed that America has to “save capitalism from itself” and that, yes, Scandinavia is great. “I love Denmark,” declared Clinton. It was the only time in the debate a candidate uttered the verb “love.”

Liberals have had a crush on Scandinavia for decades. “It is a country whose very name has become a synonym for a materialist paradise,” observed Time magazine in a 1976 story on Sweden. “Its citizens enjoy one of the world’s highest living standards. . . . Neither ill health, unemployment nor old age pose the terror of financial hardship. [Sweden’s] cradle-to-grave benefits are unmatched in any other free society outside Scandinavia.” In 2010, a National Public Radio story marveled at the way “Denmark Thrives Despite High Taxes.” The small Nordic nation, said NPR, “seems to violate the laws of the economic universe,” improbably balancing low poverty and unemployment rates with stratospheric taxes that were among the world’s highest.

Such paeans may inspire Clinton’s love and Sanders’ faith in America’s socialist future. As with most urban legends, however, the reality of Scandinavia’s welfare-state utopia doesn’t match the hype.

To begin with, explains Swedish scholar Nima Sanandaji, the affluence and cultural norms upon which Scandinavia’s social-democratic policies rest are not the product of socialism. In “Scandinavian Unexceptionalism,” a penetrating new book published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, Sanandaji shows that the Nordic nations’ prosperity “developed during periods characterized by free-market policies, low or moderate taxes, and limited state involvement in the economy.”
For example, Sweden was a poor nation for most of the 19th century (which helps explain the great wave of Swedish emigration to the United States in the 1800s). That began to change as Stockholm, starting around 1870, turned to free-enterprise reforms. Robust capitalism replaced the formerly agrarian system, and Sweden grew rich. “Property rights, free markets, and the rule of law combined with large numbers of well-educated engineers and entrepreneurs,” Sanandaji writes. The result was an environment in which Swedes experienced “an unprecedented period of sustained and rapid economic development.” In fact, between 1870 and 1936, Sweden had the highest growth rate in the industrialized world.

Scandinavia’s hard-left turn didn’t come about until much later. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that taxes soared, welfare payments expanded, and entrepreneurship was discouraged.

But what emerged wasn’t heaven on earth.

That 1976 story in Time, for example, went on to report that Sweden found itself struggling with crime, drug addiction, welfare dependency, and a plague of red tape. Successful Swedes — most famously, Ingmar Bergman — were fleeing the country to avoid its killing taxes. “Growing numbers are plagued by a persistent, gnawing question: Is their Utopia going sour?”

Sweden’s world-beating growth rate dried up. In 1975, it had been the fourth-wealthiest nation on earth (as measured by GDP per capita); by 1993, it had dropped to 14th. By then, Swedes had begun to regard their experiment with socialism as, in Sanandaji’s phrase, “a colossal failure.”

Denmark has come to a similar conclusion. Its lavish subsidies are being rolled back amid sharp concerns about welfare abuse and an eroding work ethic. In the last general election, Danes replaced a left-leaning government with one tilted to the right. Loving Denmark doesn’t mean loving big-government welfarism.

The real key to Scandinavia’s unique successes isn’t socialism, it’s culture. Social trust and cohesion, a broad egalitarian ethic, a strong emphasis on work and responsibility, commitment to the rule of law — these are healthy attributes of a Nordic culture that was ingrained over centuries. In the region’s small and homogeneous countries (overwhelmingly white, Protestant, and native-born), those norms took deep root. The good outcomes and high living standards they produced antedated the socialist nostrums of the 1970s. Scandinavia’s quality of life didn’t spring from leftist policies. It survived them.

Sanandaji makes the acute observation that when Scandinavian emigrants left for the United States, those cultural attributes went with them and produced the same good effects. Scandinavian-Americans have higher incomes and lower poverty rates than the US average. Indeed, Danish-Americans economically outperform Danes still living in Denmark, as do Swedish-Americans compared with Swedes and Finnish-Americans compared with Finns. Scandinavian culture has been a blessing for native Scandinavians — and even more of one for their cousins across the ocean.

No, Scandinavia doesn’t “violate the laws of the economic universe.” It confirms them. With free markets and healthy values, almost any society will thrive. Socialism only makes things worse.Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeff_jacoby.

North Carolina Fights Federal, Corporate Blackmail Over Trans Bathroom Law

Corporations are free to take their business to whomever they choose (how ironic - I thought they could be forced to provide a service on demand as a condition of them being 'open for business').  The government, however, is a different matter.  The President is using the threat of withholding federal money to enact policy over a state beyond his Constitutional reach.  That is a gross misuse of power.  The federal government does not have an 'open bathroom' policy as far as I'm aware, but the President feels it's appropriate to meddle in a state's decision on the matter.

North Carolina Fights Federal, Corporate Blackmail Over Trans Bathroom Law
President Obama and major corporations are threatening North Carolina with millions in lost funds for passing a law to ensure equal access to sex-specific bathrooms by both sexes.


By D.C. McAllister
April 4, 2016

North Carolina’s Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, which requires people to use the bathroom that matches their biological sex and not their preferred “gender identity,” has been maligned across the nation as “anti-LGBT,” but the law isn’t discriminatory at all.

The state legislature passed and the governor signed the Privacy and Security Act after the Charlotte City Council voted to require businesses to allow a man into a women’s restroom, shower, or locker room if the men want. According to governor’s office, “this ordinance would have eliminated the basic expectations of privacy people have when using the rest room by allowing people to use the restroom of their choice.”

The Charlotte ordinance, which had been soundly defeated in the past but was pushed through this year despite opposition from parents, businesses, and pro-women groups, brought up serious questions about privacy, as well as safety concerns that perverts posing as transgender people could take advantage of the law to harm others.

North Carolina’s action is not isolated. It is one of at least 37 states where cities and towns cannot pass regulations that exceed the authority given to them by the state. In passing the bathroom ordinance, Charlotte was exceeding its authority and setting rules that had ramifications beyond the city. According to the state, “the legislature acted to address privacy and safety concerns if this ordinance was allowed to go into effect on April 1.”

The backlash has been heated as the legislature has been accused of passing a bill that violates the rights of LGBT citizens. In response, Gov. Pat McCrory published a list of “Myths vs Facts” about this common-sense privacy law. He makes 18 very important points, including that the bill does not “limit or prohibit private sector companies from adopting their own nondiscrimination policies or practices,” “take away existing protections for individuals in North Carolina,” prevent businesses from allowing “transgender individuals to use the bathroom, locker room or other facilities of the gender they identify with, or provide other accommodations,” or “prohibit towns, cities or counties in North Carolina from setting their own nondiscrimination policies in employment.” In addition, “This law simply says people must use the bathroom of the sex listed on their birth certificate. Anyone who has undergone a sex change can change their sex on their birth certificate.”

President Obama is currently considering whether he thinks the new law is a reason to axe North Carolina’s federal aid for schools, highways, and housing. Title IX funding is being threatened, even though a court has already ruled in Virginia that schools should not lose Title IX funding for not allowing transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice. According to this ruling, McCrory is right that NC won’t lose the funding. This decision, however, is being appealed.

No one is being denied use of a bathroom, and private businesses are free to do what they want.

Obama’s threat in the name of “civil rights” puts pressure on North Carolina to repeal the law. Experts say this is unlikely, but Obama’s review of the pro-privacy act puts North Carolina on notice, as has happened in other states. Such a threat would make sense if the law were actually discriminatory, but it isn’t since men and women are being treated equally—both have equal access to bathrooms according to their actual sex. No one is being denied use of a bathroom, and private businesses are free to do what they want.

Despite this fact, big companies, such as American Airlines, Lowe’s, Google, Apple, and the NBA have denounced the law. ESPN, which has been considering Charlotte Motor Speedway for its summer X Games, has said it embraces diversity and inclusion and will “evaluate all its options.”

Facebook, which has a data center in North Carolina, says it’s “disappointed by the recent events in North Carolina.” The NCAA, which has men’s basketball tournaments planned in North Carolina through 2018, has stated that it is “monitoring the situation.”

Obviously, there is a full-court press of intimidation being leveled at North Carolina for standing up for a common-sense privacy law. This hysteria over HB2 shows the power LGBT militants and their sycophants in Hollywood and big business exert over the minds of Americans, which results in nothing less than propagandized groupthink rooted in mass delusion.

Threatening a state that wants to protect those rights is a form of bullying that borders on fascism.

Forcing businesses to allow men into women’s bathrooms (and vice versa) and violating real privacy rights and then threatening a state that wants to protect those rights is a form of bullying that borders on fascism—a point Tammy Bruce made when LGBT activists made threats against owners of a pizza shop in Indianapolis.

“For us to put on to these small business owners this kind of totalitarian boot is clearly us becoming the monster we were fighting against,” she said. “This kind of bullying, this kind of fascism in the name of equality doesn’t make sense.”

Libertarian journalist John Stossel agrees, saying in an interview with Bill O’Reilly that the homosexual “movement has moved from tolerance to totalitarianism. It’s the totalitarianism of the Left.”

The Ultimate End: Expanding Government Power

When the governor of New York said he was going to ban travel of public employees to North Carolina because of the pro-privacy law, McCrory called him out for his ludicrous declaration.

If you stand with North Carolina, you stand for states’ rights, individual liberties, actual civil rights, and common sense.

“Is the type of democracy we’re going to have where you go to Cuba and then you tell citizens not to come to North Carolina?” McCrory asked. “First of all, a lot of New Yorkers already moved to North Carolina, have made North Carolina their permanent home. I’m sorry, Gov. Cuomo, but that’s a fact. Maybe it’s because we believe in just common-sense privacy laws, and by the way we also are against any types of discrimination, but that doesn’t mean we overturn basic common-sense expectations of privacy that men and women and children expect when they go to a locker room or a restroom or a shower facility. This is ridiculous.”

It is ridiculous. The Charlotte ordinance that started all this would have forced businesses and schools to open bathrooms to anyone according to their self-perceived gender identity, violating the safety and privacy of women and children. The state of North Carolina rightly stepped in, because this is a valid pubic safety issue, and restored the rights of North Carolinians as well as protecting women and children, something the gay mafia dismisses in the name of its militant agenda.

Now, the Obama administration is trying to exert authoritarian control over a sovereign state in the name of civil rights when no civil rights are being violated. This is really what’s at the heart of transgender laws—not equal protections of transgender people, but the growth and power of the state.

Anyone who supports this kind of totalitarian overreach or cheers the boycott of North Carolina has drunk the Kool-Aid of leftist bullies. If you stand with North Carolina, you stand for states’ rights, individual liberties, actual civil rights, and common sense. The NC governor needs to be supported, not attacked, and encouraged not to cave to the dictates of the gay mafia as other governors have done.

“The bottom line is that it will take real courage to stop the machine of government abuse of power, a machine the gay mafia has such a hand in promoting,” writes Senior Contributor to The Federalist Stella Morabito. “GOP governors who refuse to respect the will of the majority of the people of their states by caving to LGBT tactics of extortion may think they are protecting their state’s economy and reputation. They may even feel gratification when the mafia pats them on the back for cooperating, and congratulates them for ‘nothing happening’ to the nice state they got there. But that will prove to be nothing but a temporary illusion for those governors and their states. And as such things always go, the children will suffer the most.”

Trump + Function of Federal Government

Yet again proving that Trump is not a conservative, check out his answer to a question at CNN's town hall last night:

Q: "In your opinion, what are the top 3 functions of the United States Government"

A: (Paraphrase) National Security, Healthcare, Education

Does any conservative (or libertarian) believe the federal government should oversee healthcare and education? Nearly all Republicans believe healthcare and education would benefit from less federal government intrusion, not more.

I understand it's too late now, that the train has already left the station, but how is it this man is leading the Republican primary?  Add to the fact he never discusses the proper role of the federal government, its limitations, or the importance of the Constitution as a guiding framework.

So disappointing.  In fairness, at the 2:20 mark, right after he says the government should provide housing (?), when Anderson Cooper asks him if the power to oversee education should devolve to states, he says 'absolutely', then babels on about 'concept of the country'.  This continues to reinforce my belief that he doesn't value federalism and limited federal government - he sees all levels of government as a single force.  Either that, or he's making it up as he goes along. Either way, it's not good for those who support a restrained federal government that ensures freedom for all.

70 Tries After Seattle Raised Its Minimum Wage, I Still Can’t Find A Job

Only those unfamiliar with the laws of supply/demand are surprised by this story.


70 Tries After Seattle Raised Its Minimum Wage, I Still Can’t Find A Job
States nationwide are beginning to join the ‘Fight for $15.’ My job experience in Seattle, Washington helps illustrate why that’s a bad idea.

By Mitch Hall
March 29, 2016

Over the weekend, lawmakers and labor unions in California, the nation’s most populous state, reached a tentative agreement to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the course of the next several years.

Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown had opposed prior legislative proposals over the issue, but finally acquiesced after labor unions garnered enough support last week to qualify an initiative for the Nov. 8 ballot. The deal still has to go through the state legislature, but most anticipate legislators will approve it, thus avoiding the costly campaigning that would result from a squabble at the ballot box.

California’s compromise comes as part of a growing national movement to hike up minimum wages across the county. Indeed, over the past two years, a whole host of states and cities have rapidly pushed through legislation to raise their base pay, likely in response to President Obama’s repeated calls for higher wages.

Twenty-nine states have minimum wages that exceed the federally mandated $7.25 per hour. Heading into the 2016 election, the issue remains hotly contested and politically potent, with Republican presidential candidates in fierce opposition to, and Democratic candidates in strong support of, a dramatic increase in the federal minimum wage.

While many cities have forced local employers to pay artificially higher wages, the issue remains far from settled. Just last month, for instance, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley signed a bill prohibiting Alabama towns from increasing their wages above the state’s, a move that came in response to the Birmingham City Council voting to raise their city’s base pay to $10.10 an hour.

In stark contrast to the reaction from California, many have since decried Alabama’s bill (Hillary Clinton’s campaign even characterized it as “disturbing“). Yet while opposition to wage hikes may be politically unpopular, more states should consider adopting laws like Bentley’s before it’s too late. As California’s deal demonstrates, the “fight for $15” is moving beyond just cities and towns. It now has the power to influence policy at the state level.

Jobless in Seattle

My opposition to minimum wage increases comes as a direct result of my own experience searching for jobs as a new resident of Seattle, Washington, a city that currently has one of the highest minimum wages in the nation. In June 2014, the Seattle City Council, composed of just nine members, unanimously voted to increase the city’s base pay to a whopping $15 an hour, to be gradually implemented over the course of several years.

I’ve spent the majority of the last two months stalking online job sites and entire days traversing the various neighborhoods of Seattle.

On January 1, 2016, the newly mandated minimum wage rose to $13 for larger companies (those that have more than 500 employees in the United States), and $10.50 for smaller employers (those with fewer than 500 employees in the United States). On top of this, Washington state law now requires businesses to adhere to this minimum even for tipped workers, a rule that only six other states have on the books.

In December, I found myself needing a break from college, for a variety of reasons. So at the close of last semester, I decided (rather impulsively, as young people are wont to do) to take my spring semester off from the College of William and Mary and move out west to try my luck in Seattle, a place I had only visited once before.

My parents, although grateful to have one less semester of ridiculously high out-of-state tuition to pay for, let me know that I’d need to fund the venture myself. I had secured an internship in the Seattle area, but it was unpaid, so I knew I’d have to find additional part-time work very quickly.

Having a combined two years of serving experience and close to five years of total experience in the customer and food services industries (which is literally as much as you can ask for from a 20-year-old college student), I assumed I’d be able to find a restaurant gig in no time. So, after reassuring my parents all would be well in the financial department, I boarded a plane in Philly a few weeks later and made the move.

Yet seven weeks and more than 70 job applications later, I still have yet to land a part-time, minimum wage job. I’ve spent the majority of the last two months stalking online job sites and entire days traversing the various neighborhoods of Seattle, filling out applications and inquiring about job opportunities at any restaurant, coffee shop, retail store, or other service-oriented establishment I can find.

Having squandered all of the money I had saved to get myself through what I thought would be a brief job-hunting period, I now find myself faced with the reality that if I don’t find work very, very soon, I’ll have to cut my break short and move back to the East Coast.

Higher Wages Mean Higher Stakes

At first, I was utterly dumbfounded by my lack of success, and figured only bad luck was to blame. After all, I had been hired at every single one of my past serving jobs within only a day or two of searching and applying. I’d have to find something in Seattle eventually, I thought; I’m young, competent, and college-educated, and serving is by no means a highly skilled occupation that requires degrees or extensive training. I know how to make a good impression with prospective employers, and I already have years of experience in the food services industry. What more could these people want?

Employers, especially in the restaurant and food services industries, are far less willing to take chances on who they hire with so much money on the line.

But soon enough it became clear, through talking with potential employers and local college students also trying to find work, that my failure to land a job was likely due, at least in large part, to Seattle’s absurdly high minimum wage.

Employers, especially in the restaurant and food services industries, are far less willing to take chances on who they hire with so much money on the line. I was shocked to learn that some restaurants—comparable in quality to the ones that hired me with little or no experience on the East Coast—here required a minimum of three to five years of restaurant experience, even for support staff positions like hosts and bussers. I had multiple managers glance at my resume, see that my past jobs were seasonal or temporary, and tell me upfront that unless I could commit to at least a year of labor, they simply wouldn’t hire me, despite my qualifications.

Contrast this with my past experience working in Pennsylvania and Virginia, states that have a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for non-tipped workers and a base pay of $2.13 per hour for positions that do receive tips. To the uninformed observer, this situation looks a lot worse than the progressive system Washington has put in place, and admittedly, after taxes most of my paychecks came out to little more than $0.

But in reality this wasn’t an issue, because the tips easily made up for the hourly wage I was missing. Working 30 hours a week, I was able to bring home around $500 per week, which translates to about $17 per hour and $26,000 a year. According to the Foundation for Economic Education, this is just about enough to keep a family of four above the poverty line. That’s only part-time work. A full-time server in your average successful restaurant would be able to make even more than that.

Working 30 hours a week, I was able to bring home around $500 per week, which translates to about $17 per hour and $26,000 a year.

Restaurateurs in states with the $2.13 per hour minimum wage requirement have much more opportunity for variety in their hiring practices, for the cost to train someone is little, and the tip-based salary incentivizes individual employees to improve on their own while allowing the business to keep most of its profits. They can usually hire year-round, and can afford to choose from a much more diverse applicant pool. This is likely why I was able to secure my first restaurant job, when I was 18 years old and had no prior serving experience, as a summer employee in a busy Mexican restaurant.

Even for other industries dominated by minimum-wage jobs, such as retail, maintenance, construction, and transportation, a $7.25 hourly rate allows for similar hiring diversity, and also enables a company to take on twice the amount of employees as it would be able to in a $15 minimum-wage state. It should surprise no one, for instance, that nearly all of the states with the most minimum-wage employees are in the South, an area where only two states—Florida ($8.05 per hour) and Arkansas ($8.50 per hour)—have minimum wages above the federally mandated $7.25.

Given this, it makes sense that Seattle employers forced to pay the new minimum wage even to tipped employees only feel comfortable hiring highly qualified prospects who can prove on paper they’ll be a safe long-term investment. These restaurateurs and store managers don’t want to risk hiring a relatively inexperienced young adult they’ll have to spend precious time and money training, and who may easily grow complacent in the job once he realizes he’ll get paid $13 an hour no matter the extent of his stay or the quality of his job performance.

Who Makes the Minimum Wage?

Higher minimum wages favor people who have already made a career out of these jobs—or, in other words, the very people minimum wage jobs are not intended for.

Political pundits and proponents of minimum wage increases predicate their arguments on the false notion that the majority of minimum wage-workers are poor breadwinners who depend exclusively on their jobs for survival. Indeed, to garner support for reform, the Left often cites the fact that a family of three or four cannot live on the $15,080 annual income a full-time employee theoretically makes with the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

The typical minimum wage worker is someone like me: a young adult who’s working part-time to make money supplemental to an existing (family) income.

Democrats frequently tout this point and deploy their new favorite term “living wage” to purposefully obscure the reality that most minimum wage workers do not, in fact, rely on their entry-level jobs to fully support themselves or their families.

The most recent statistics by the Pew Research Center support this assertion. According to the 2014 research, 50.4 percent of all minimum-wage workers are ages 16 to 24, 64 percent work only part-time, and 55 percent are employed in the leisure and hospitality industry (including food preparation and other service-related jobs). The majority are white (77 percent), and well over half (62 percent) are women. In other words, the typical minimum wage worker is someone like me: a young adult who’s working part-time to make money supplemental to an existing (family) income.

The overall share of hourly paid workers earning minimum wage or less has also significantly decreased over the past few decades: in 1979, they represented 7.9 percent of all wage and salary workers, whereas today they represent only 2.6 percent of that demographic. With such a small percentage of the working population earning base pay or below, it’s unlikely that increasing the federal minimum wage by 50 percent or 100 percent would do much at all to improve the overall poverty rate.

Minimum Wage Hikes Hurt Those They’re Intended to Help

Basic economic logic lends credit to arguments against minimum wage hikes. If employers now have to pay their employees twice the amount they used to, they have two options: reduce the number of their employees, or raise the prices of their products—a move that drives down business and thus leads to job elimination anyway.

If employers now have to pay their employees twice the amount they used to, they have two options: reduce the number of their employees, or raise the prices of their products.

In Seattle, this is exactly what’s been happening. As research from the widely respected American Enterprise Institute explains, early evidence from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests that “since last April when the first minimum wage hike took effect: a) the city’s employment has fallen by more than 11,000, b) the number of unemployed workers has risen by nearly 5,000, and c) the city’s jobless rate has increased by more than 1 percentage point.”

Thanks to the growing cost of labor, fast food prices are currently on the rise in Seattle, and restaurants here and in other cities are now considering getting rid of tipping altogether, proposing they instead increase their prices by 20 percent. While this might help restaurateurs pay their employees the new mandatory minimum, I can say from my own experience it would also likely dis-incentivize servers and diminish the quality of service.

Wage hikes not only force more people to compete for fewer positions, but they also pit people like me against older, more seasoned, and perhaps more qualified individuals who look a lot more attractive to Seattle employers.

I’m a young, educated, white male who comes from an upper-middle-class background. In other words, I’m exactly the type of person that society supposedly favors over all the rest. If it’s this difficult for me to land an entry-level, minimum-wage position, then what must it be like for more disadvantaged individuals, the very people compassionate liberals likely have in mind when they advocate for a spike in the minimum wage? Surely the poor inner-city teenager lacking education and job experience, or the struggling single mother who needs to work much more than just part-time to support her children, will lose out to other applicants even faster than I did.

The fact that cities like Seattle, and now states like California, can freely experiment with economic policy demonstrates the virtues of our nation’s federalist system. However, our local laboratories of democracy aren’t always foolproof. Sometimes, they get it wrong.

And I’ll bet my non-existent income that in time, the recent minimum wage hikes in cities and states throughout the country will provide further proof of this reality. Alas, in the meantime, my job search continues.

Healthcare costs rising faster than incomes

Remember when the President promised his healthcare law would save $2,500 per family?

Apparently that was about as true as when he said "If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan".

On Obamacare’s sixth anniversary, report finds premiums up 28 percent in five years

BY: Ali Meyer
March 23, 2016 2:20 pm

Health insurance premiums have increased faster than wages and inflation in recent years, rising an average of 28 percent from 2009 to 2014 despite the enactment of Obamacare, according to a report from Freedom Partners.

President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010, and Wednesday is the law’s sixth anniversary.

The Obama administration expressed concern in 2009 about skyrocketing health care premiums in a report entitled, “The Burden of Health Insurance Premium Increases on American Families.” They were concerned that premiums had increased by 5.5 percent from 2008 to 2009.

However, from 2010 to 2011 in the first year after Obamacare was enacted, premiums increased by 9.4 percent.

“In 2009, when the [Executive Office of the President] issued its report, states had seen premiums increase on average by 30 percent between 2004 and 2009,” states the Freedom Partners report. “But since 2009, health insurance premiums have continued to grow faster than wages in nearly every state, averaging a 28 percent increase from 2009 to 2014, resulting in a greater amount of disposable income being consumed by rising premiums.”

According to the report, while premiums increased by 28 percent from 2009 to 2014, wages increased by only 7.8 percent. From 2004 to 2009 when premiums increased by 30 percent, wages increased by only 12.2 percent.

The data also finds that health care costs have exceeded the rate of inflation. “The average annual cost of a family’s employer-sponsored health insurance policy was $17,545 in 2015, which marks a 4.2 percent increase from the 2014 average of $16,834, while the inflation rate remained low at 0.1 percent,” states the report. “With health care costs still rising faster than inflation six years after passage of the Affordable Care Act, it is clear that the law is not helping lower the burden of health care expenses for American families.”

Americans can expect their health care costs to rise again in 2017. According to Stephen Parente, a scholar at the University of Minnesota, each type of health care plan on the exchanges can expect to see an average premium increase of 7.3 percent for families and 11 percent for individuals.

“The Administration claimed the ACA would bend the cost curve, but our report shows it bent in the wrong direction—premiums didn’t slow down under the Affordable Care Act, they sped up,” said Nathan Nascimento, senior policy adviser at Freedom Partners. “No wonder the White House is trying to change the national conversation away from health care costs. By their own standards, the Affordable Care Act has failed.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment by press time.