Month: July 2010

A Novel Defense Of Minimum Wage Laws

by Patrick Appel

Felix Salmon attempts one:

Without unions and minimum-wage laws, corporations compete on who can pay the least. With them, they compete on who has the best employees and they invest significantly in those employees. Which is exactly what we want, especially since raising the minimum wage is unlikely in and of itself to increase unemployment visibly.

He expands on this thought here. I'd like to believe this, and it may be correct in some instances, but am not sure it's true for all companies – or even for Walmart, the company Felix mentions.

Look Who’s Talking “Massive Resistance” Now

by David Frum

John Vecchione on Democrats who defy Supreme Court decisions:

Comes news from the Windy City that in response to the resounding victory for Second Amendment Rights in McDonald v. Chicago the Mayor and City Counsel have turned to the city’s problems in a manner designed to protect constitutional liberties.  Just kidding.  They have instituted a scheme of “massive resistance.”

Mayor Daley has said he will not “roll over” to the Supreme Court.  Now, I’m as much for not treating Supreme Court pronouncements as gospel as the next guy (presuming he has an “Impeach Warren” bumper sticker down in the basement), but this is really a scandal.    This is not a made-up right we have come to expect from the Court. Yet Chicago, the President’s home town, has in four days set out to resist, resist, resist the clear import of the Court’s decision.  President Obama has said nothing.

Which Jobs Should We Protect?

by Patrick Appel

Mike Masnick adds his voice to those finding Andy Grove's article wanting:

How do you pick the "good jobs" from the jobs we're actually better off offshoring. Nearly every day we hear stories about attempts by the US government to protect jobs in a particular industry. Just look at US telco policy or US copyright policy — both of which are very much designed to prop up less efficient companies in the industry, at the expense of more innovative, more efficient upstarts. Protecting jobs comes at a cost to efficiency. If we always had a policy of "protecting jobs," then we never would have automated the telephone switching system, which put tons of "operators" out of work. But that also opened up massive new innovations, including the internet. I don't think anyone would argue that the jobs created due to more efficient telephone switching have so far surpassed the jobs lost from no longer needing operators to connect one party to another.

The View From Your Recession

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I've been relatively isolated from the recession.  I'm employed, my friends are employed, and my young adult children have found jobs.  But that isolation ended this month when the nonprofit I work at advertised for a 30 hr/week Administrative Assistant.  We received 180 applicants – easily three times what I would have expected.  Well over half were qualified.  The process of narrowing the list down to seven for interviews was close to arbitrary.   Four of the seven had been laid off over a year ago.  The other three had had their hours cut or expected to be laid off.  Most of those we interviewed had trouble disguising their desperation.  The person we hired had been laid off a year ago and was thrilled to take a job paying 40% less – barely enough to pay for a one-bedroom apartment.  The second-runner up had to get off the phone as she burst into tears.  Three others we interviewed wanted to know if there was anything they had done wrong.  They REALLY wanted to know.  In thirty years of hiring I have never experienced anything like this.

One way I coped was by being very kind.  I made sure to promptly acknowledge all applications and received repeated thank you emails for doing so.  I hear again and again that people have applied dozens of times without ever hearing anything.  I made sure to talk personally to all those we interviewed but didn't hire.  Their gratitude was palpable.

Testing The Gaydar Of The Troops?

by Patrick Appel

Nate Silver knocks the Pentagon's DADT survey of the troops. In one section it asks service-members to speculate whether other troops are gay:

The survey (at least from what we've seen of it so far) goes out of its way to avoid asking the troops about something which is arguably more relevant and which is certainly more measurable: their opinions about DADT. At no point, for instance does it pose the simple question of whether or not the solider thinks that DADT should be repealed. I'd have no huge problem if we asked our troops that; it would be up to our policymakers to weigh those findings against other factors. But the survey does not solicit the soldiers' opinions; instead, it solicits their speculation on the sexual preferences of their peers. In so doing, it insults their intelligence — and ours.

Stockman v. Greenspan, three rounds, bare-knuckled

by Dave Weigel

The former OMB director best remembered now as a slash-and-burn critic of Republican economics talks to Lloyd Grove and… well, try not to be shocked.

Stockman was an economic superstar on a par with former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.  The previous day at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he had used a luncheon to grill his former mentor, who had employed him as a student policy trainee in the Ford White House. “Alan, a long time ago, when I didn’t know anything, you taught me four things,” Stockman informed his ex-boss, who had a wry smile plastered on his otherwise poker face. “One, lower tax rates are better than higher; solvency is better than insolvency; in the long run the budget has to be balanced; and the way you do it is cut spending structurally over time. Thirty years later we didn’t follow those principles. We now have massive debt and, in that 30 years, the Republican Party had an opportunity to stand up and be counted on spending cuts and never did.” Stockman demanded:  “Would you be willing to tell them, ‘Game over! You had 30 years. Now sit down and let taxes be raised so we can avoid insolvency?’

Stockman wants Republicans to win Congress and "reform entitlements and cut spending." Sounds great! I wonder if the best way to open the conversation is over coffee in Aspen, and I wonder if Stockman can do it at all. His credibly with conservatives is about as high as Dick Morris's with Democrats. But picking apart Alan Greenspan's record here is good work, no matter who does it and where it happens.

How The Week Beat Newsweek

by David Frum

Andrew Ferguson explains:

[I]t is now an article of faith in the magazine business that readers don’t want this at all. Immersed as they are in round-the-clock cable TV and websites, they don’t need a rehash of events a week old. I’m a fuddy-duddy, world class, but I’m not so sure. It’s true that most journalists have fixed themselves to the info-teat of their iPhones’ Twitter feeds. A rather smaller percentage of normal people live this way, and the presumption that the desires and tastes of journalists are identical to those of their customers is one of the many mistakes that brought Meacham and his colleagues to their present pickle.

Meanwhile, the most successful weekly magazine in the English-speaking world is the Economist, and one of the most successful magazine start-ups of the recent past has been the Week. Both offer readers, among much else, a rehash of the past week’s events. Donald Graham might want to give them a second look.