Here Comes “Big Chef”
April 20, 2010
Well, Americans haven’t been good little boys and girls lately—at least not good enough, gastronomically-speaking, and thus along comes “Big Chef” to not only monitor, but to adjust how we eat:
U.S. Plans Drive to Limit Salt in Food
And this will likely raise few eyebrows among a populace dulled to the gradual-but-steady encroachment of the government into our private, everyday affairs. Look, would eating less salt be a good thing for us? Probably…and it might save billions a year if we chose to do that. But isn’t that the key? In a free society, we make choices—and we live (and die) by those choices. But the contemporary liberal impulse is always to push “security”—let’s qualify that, liberalism’s definition of “security”, as in Socialist Security, etc.—at the expense of freedom. And we’ve grown accustomed to government providing all sorts of (imagined) security for us (beyond rational, Constitutionally-mandated forms of security, chiefly national defense and courts of justice). Because we’ve tacitly accepted such as government’s rightly-ordained role—and because the Chuck Schumer types are all-too-willing to acts as moral nannies (holding what Thomas Sowell calls “The Vision of the Anointed”)—we think little of this. “The government is just acting in our best interests”, many say.
And somewhere, the freedom-loving men and women who gave us this republic continue to roll over in their graves.
Chucky is at it Again
April 15, 2010
OK, so Spirit Airlines decided, last week, to do something which strikes me as decidedly dumb, at least from a PR standpoint: charge $45 per carry-on bag for its flights. The fact that Spirit plans to cut its fares by $40 will certainly be lost on travelers, and there is little doubt in my mind that this will be a PR fiasco predictable enough that one wonders what the powers that be at Spirit were thinking.
So what does New York Senator Chuck Schumer plan to do about it? Act as our nanny. Now, one of two things is happening: either Chuck lacks the most basic understanding of economics—as well as the most basic understanding of the role of our ostensibly limited government in our Constitutional system, or he is grandstanding in a shameless attempt to score political points among his constituents who are…shall we say, either Constitutionally or mentally challenged? I doubt that Senator Schumer is nearly that dumb, which leaves the second option as the obvious one: seizing upon what seems to be a dumb move by a corporation, Senator Schumer is grabbing the opportunity to make it look like he—and the Democrats—are really “on the side of the little guy”.
Rubbish. Aside from the fact that this doesn’t fall within light years of the government’s purview, what possible good could this accomplish (answer: zero)? Spirit has to make money to be in business, and it thought that this was a good way to make that happen. I think it’s a dumb marketing ploy—but in a free society, Spirit needs to suffer whatever costs a free people decide to exact upon the company for this decision. Don’t want to pay $45 to carry on a bag? Fly JetBlue. Fly American. Fly Delta. Vote with your wallet.
Same as a couple years back when the Schumer-types were all up in arms about banks paying ATM fees, suggesting that banks were “gouging” consumers by charging fees that some government wonks, in their infinite wisdom, decided were “too high”. Well, excuse me for living, but if a bank wants to charge me $50 per ATM fee, that’s none of the government’s business. None. Zero, zilch, nada. Why? Because I’m free. And because this is supposed to be a free country. And if my bank engages in practices I find not to be to my liking, I am perfectly free to do business with a different bank. I’ve done it before with banks, and I’ve done it with other companies, and I don’t need the government to be my nanny and make decisions of this nature for me. And if people don’t care enough about it to allow companies to get away with making these kinds of decisions, then as long as the government is making sure that there’s a level playing field for other companies to provide their services to me in a free market, then beyond that, the government should stay the heck out of it.
Not that I expect liberal do-gooders like Senator Chucky to understand that in this lifetime.
What Should Minimum Wage Be?
March 10, 2010
Zero, of course.
In a great article published yesterday by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution–which does seem to be diversifying a little bit to the right in its editorial page, a welcome change–Richard Burkhauser makes the point that if we are serious about reducing unemployment—particularly among the young and inexperienced, who if allowed to remain chronically un-and under-employed, will create all sorts of headaches down the road—then politicians need to revisit the 40% increase in the minimum wage passed in 2007. Well, duh.
Cutting the Basic Wage to Spur Jobs
It’s just common sense, so much so as to be, effectively, axiomatic: the artificial inflation of the cost of goods and services—which is exactly what happens with a “minimum wage”—messes up the economy. When government meddles in what ought to be private affairs—even when government does it with the best of intentions—the train goes off the tracks. It is so predictable as to be laughable that when employers are forced to pay employees more than the employees are worth, there will be less employees doing more work.
Progressive politicians don’t understand this—or if they do, they are simply evil people. Because it hurts everyone when the minimum wage is increased—everyone. The price of goods and services go up, and/or the quality of goods and services goes down, and/or the unemployment rolls increase. There’s simply no way around that, because to think otherwise is to subscribe to what I call the “Big Bag o’ Money Theory” about business: businesses have a big bag o’ money just sitting around collecting interest and dust, and it’s a bag o’ money that business ought to be sharing with others, so when the government passes silly laws to make businesses give more money to its employees, it’s as simple as digging into the big bag o’ money and divvying up “their fair share”.
And leprechauns will soon be flying out of…somewhere.
Want to put people back to work? At the very least, create a second minimum wage targeted at the young unemployed. Get ‘em working for, say, $5 an hour. They won’t get rich—minimum wage won’t make anybody rich, nor should it—but they’ll get working. And they’ll help business. And they’ll develop skills and prove their merit and all sorts of good things that are currently being blocked by this monstrosity we call “minimum wage”.
Stossel on Education
February 18, 2010
Public education doesn’t work. If that fact isn’t as plain as the noses on our faces, we’re ignoring reality. Before I go further, quick aside: I always, when I write on education issues, try to be careful to signal my profound appreciation for the many good public school teachers/administrators out there, who take their jobs seriously, who put their students’ achievement ahead of their own advancement, who sacrifice to help prepare kids for society. Among these are many fine Christians who see their calling as taking their faith into the classroom–muted as they are required to be about it. I salute them, applaud them, and appreciate them.
But they are fighting, I believe, a losing battle. And not to recognize that fact is to doom us to continue the failed educational policies of the past half-century.
The fact is that, as Stossel points out, the elitists in control, from Comrade Obama on down, see more government involvement in our schools as a good thing, when the facts at hand argue just the opposite. We spend more; we get no discernible results. Right now, we are spending a boatload of money on public education, with little to show for it; there is effectively no correlation between the amount of money spent on education and the results in the lives of the students (remember that the next time they want to raise your taxes to support education). As Stossel concludes, “choice works, but government monopolies don’t.” And he’s right.
Truthers, Birthers…and Racers
February 17, 2010
I think it’s time to introduce a new word into our political discourse to designate a very real, and dangerous, group of fringe wingnuts. We’ve got the “Truthers”, crazies who think that the U.S. government was behind 9/11. Incidentally, Glenn Beck did the citizens of Texas a real service this past week when he exposed a gubernatorial candidate–a Tea Partier, of all folks–as a “Truther”. Debra Medina, who has about pulled even in the polls with the sinking Kay Bailey Hutchison (thankfully, trailing Governor Rick Perry by a significant margin), told Glenn that, effectively, she hasn’t really weighed all the evidence, and thus hasn’t reached a conclusion, about whether or not the government was behind 9/11. Thanks for playing, Ms. Medina, but you’re a kook–even if you and I agree on a lot of Tea Party issues. If you are a “Truther”, or even if you entertain the possibility that they’re onto something, you scare Americans with a brain.
On the other side of the coin, politically, are the “Birthers”, folks who continue to press the idea that Comrade Obama wasn’t born in the United States. They produce “evidence”–equally spurious to that produced by the “Truthers”–to supposedly buttress their claims. They deserve to be dismissed as kooks as well.
But there’s a third category of people that ought to be placed alongside “Truthers” and “Birthers”; let’s call them “Racers”. Keith Olbermann goes to the top of the list of “Racers”, continuing to find racist motives behind the Tea Party movement, for instance, fabricating evidence from his own fertile imagination in the absence of anything approximating proof. I referred in a recent post to a professor at Atlanta’s Spellman College, who protested a pro-life ad (an ad condemning the genocide of African-American babies) as “racist”. Chris Mathews “forgot that Barack Obama was a black man” during the State of the Union. These folks find race in everything; these folks are convinced that racism underlies everything that people (well, conservative people) do. And so, to Olberclown and his ilk, the Tea Party has to be racist at root–ignoring mounds of evidence to the contrary and choosing to look through their pink-colored glasses and find what’s not there. Are there racists in the Tea Party movement? Certainly–just as there are racists in groups right and left all across American society. Is racism a genuine evil, a terrible scourge on this country? Absolutely. Is racism an issue in which America has made leaps and bounds of progress? Only a fool oblivious to the evidence would argue otherwise. But is the fact that many Americans are fed up with the economic agenda of the Bush/Obama administration (yes, you heard me) evidence that, because Comrade Obama is a black man, we’re racist? Preposterous–but not to the “Racers”. I propose we add that term to our political jargon, because “Racers” deserve exactly as much attention and credibility as “Truthers” and “Birthers”.
Postal Service Health Care
November 24, 2009
Sound good to you? I just spent better part of 20 minutes trying to get a simple answer to a simple question–and it’ll take another hour of research, according to the fellow who finally came out to talk with me. I had asked, “where’s the church’s mail, since I put in a mail-forwarding request on October 30th, and haven’t seen a single piece of mail yet?”
Yeah, I can’t wait to have these same folks (and their same level of competence) making decisions on how to treat my medical issues.
Update: The dear gentleman called me back and “had no record that we’d ever put in a change-of-address order”.
And the dear doctor called back and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Harvey, but we have no record of your previous health issues. Please refresh my memory: did you have terminal cancer or a slight backache?”
Wouldn’t it Be Nice to Have an American Conservative with Some Guts?
March 30, 2009
This is absolutely great; I’m sure our buddy Graham ate this one up; I love this video. It’s Conservative Party member Daniel Hannan giving Prime Minister Gordon Brown down the country:
We can only hope that a Daniel Hannan manages to get himself elected Prime Minister in Great Britain one day, so as to stare down people like Comrade Obama and show him some backbone.
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Osborne: A Contrarian's Guide to Knowing God
Schlossberg: Idols For Destruction
