Tag: Government

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

Speaking of mandatory minimum-wage foolishness:

“Even in a robust economy such as we’re currently enjoying, the laws of supply and demand can’t be overridden. Restaurants still exist in a highly competitive environment and their profit margins remain generally low. A sudden increase in labor costs hits their bottom line immediately so they begin reducing the workforce and/or cutting back on hours for their servers and back of the house workers.
“The state is unable to artificially mandate prosperity without the free market responding to correct for the imbalance. That’s a lesson too many state and municipal governments seem painfully slow to learn.” — Jazz Shaw, via Insty.

VDH Explains The Insanity

Politics

Not for the first time, Victor Davis Hanson explains why the Left have become so totally fucking unhinged:

The National Security Council was weaponized and thus unmasked the names of surveilled Americans and leaked their names to the press to undermine the Trump campaign. The Department of Justice was weaponized to ensure Hillary Clinton was exonerated for her misdeeds concerning her email server and quid pro quo collusion with a variety of foreign and domestic influence peddlers and buyers. The FBI and CIA were weaponized to subvert the Trump campaign, by peddling an unverified smear dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton, by implanting informants into the Trump campaign, and by undermining a FISA court through dishonest presentations of evidence for warrants to spy on American citizens.
All such behavior was assumed to ensure the landslide Clinton victory and thus would be seen as sacrifice beyond the call of duty to be rewarded by a President Clinton not as illegal behavior to be punished during a Trump administration. And as a result, the more culpability that was exposed, the more the culpable went on the offensive—on the theory that constant attack is the best defense against their own criminal liability.

And they lost, and now they’re going to get investigated and people are (I hope) going to go to jail or face massive fines and criminal records or lose their pensions, or all the above (which I hope even more).  As Conrad Black puts it:

Now they must remove him, or he will try to imprison them, and in fact, they have almost no chance of removing him. We are doomed to a fierce battle that will end quickly if the Republicans hold the House of Representatives and Trump can get rid of Sessions and Rosenstein and indict his enemies, who have certainly asked for it.

It’s no less than the pricks deserve, and here’s a warning note to AG Sessions:  you’d better get it done, or you’ll be lumped in with them for failing to do your duty.

Now Multiply That By A Million

Business, Gummint

I saw this little story via Insty, and it made me not just sad, but furious.  Read it first.

They didn’t lose a fortune, because they never had the opportunity to earn one. Nothing happened. There they sit. And there they’ll stay.

And that’s where the writer is wrong.  You see, economists and accountants have a terms for this phenomenon, and it’s called “opportunity cost” — in other words, the financial cost of a lost opportunity.  Because when people open up their own business and it’s even moderately successful, they have to hire other people to work for them.  Those workers in turn become successful, and pay taxes, and perhaps use the learning to open their own businesses.

The aggregate opportunity cost of this ripple effect, just for this little case study, is potentially millions of dollars.  The Toni & Guy chain of hair salons started in precisely this fashion with a single outlet in the 1960s, as did the JiffyLube chain, back in 1979 — and I chose these two businesses deliberately, because those are the two types of business that the above story deals with.  Who’s to say that Kaitlyn and her husband wouldn’t have had a success story similar to Tony&Guy and JiffyLube?  But we’ll never know, will we, because the heavy hand of government regulation reached into their lives and killed their adventure before it could get started.

So when Donald Trump’s first action as POTUS was to decree that all government departments had to delete multiple regulations for every new one they wanted to promulgate, it was to free people to get going with their businesses and dreams.

Lest we forget, the fucking Democrats are the party of massive regulation and government intrusiveness — and remember that if you’re toying with a “protest” vote against Trump (or a quixotic vote for a third-party no-hoper) in the mid-term elections later this year.  (If you’re a lifetime Democrat voter and want socialism, then you’re at the wrong website and, if I may say, in the wrong country.)

It’s all very well for the economy to grow when manufacturing opens new plants and what have you (which is what Trump has also been making happen) — but that growth is finite.  Individuals starting their own businesses and becoming successful isn’t finite:  that is where America is at its strongest, and that is what will create true economic success for the whole country.  And Donald Trump understands this, and because of it he deserves our unflagging support, if for no other reason.

Skirting The Rules

Business, Funny Stuff

So what to do when you’re working outside in sweltering temperatures, but the ‘Elf & Safety regulations forbid wearing short pants?  You find a way around the rules:

The brickies — who were working in Chertsey, Surrey — were horrified by new health and safety rules forbidding shorts. But when they realised they could get around the ban by wearing women’s clothing thanks to gender equality regulations, they showed up for work in skirts and frocks.  [emphasis added]

And because this story would be no good wifout pichurs:

I love stories like this.  Fuck the bureaucrats.

Union No

Gummint, Politics

Wow.  So Michigan, once the very epitome of a union-controlled state, has kicked ass with a new law:

This week the Michigan House of Representatives took up a measure to put an end to a rule called the “prevailing wage,” a requirement that forces all construction projects initiated by state government to pay workers the same wage union members make even if the workers hired for said projects are not members of a union, MLive.com reported.

The measure passed, but how it became law is extremely impressive:

The petition submitted to the House could have been allowed to become a ballot measure, and likely that is what Protect Michigan Taxpayers expected to become of their petition. However, the state legislature always has the option to submit a petition straight to the state house and that is what the Michigan Senate did when they heard the petition and then voted 23-14 to enact its provisions. That prompted the Michigan House to take up the idea and they passed it as well, 56-53.
Indeed, since the petition met the required number of signatures to be considered and since both houses of the legislature voted to approve it, this repeal doesn’t even have to go to the Governor’s desk for a signature.  It will now simply be put into service.
Hence, Michigan’s prevailing wage rule is a dead letter.

Hubba hubba.  Now go and read the rest of the article, which argues quite persuasively against the concept of federal employee unions.

 

The Empire Strikes Back

Behind Enemy Lines, Terrorism

That would be the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of course, or rather its modern-day major components.  Fresh on the heels of Hungary’s Viktor Orban causing trouble with the Muzzies in Budapest comes this news from just over the border:

Austria’s right-wing government plans to shut down seven mosques and expel up to 40 foreign-funded imams in crackdown against Islamist ideology

Austria said today it could expel up to 60 Turkish-funded imams and their families and would shut down seven mosques as part of a crackdown on ‘political Islam’ that was described as ‘just the beginning’, triggering fury in Ankara.
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the government is shutting a hardline Turkish nationalist mosque in Vienna and dissolving a group called the Arab Religious Community that runs six mosques.
His coalition government, an alliance of conservatives and the far right, came to power soon after Europe’s migration crisis on promises to prevent another influx and clamp down on benefits for new immigrants and refugees.
In a previous job as minister in charge of integration, Chancellor Kurz oversaw the passing of a tough ‘law on Islam’ in 2015, which banned foreign funding of religious groups and created a duty for Muslim societies to have ‘a positive fundamental view towards (Austria’s) state and society’.
‘Parallel societies, political Islam and radicalisation have no place in our country,’ Kurz told a news conference outlining the government’s decisions, which were based on that law.
‘This is just the beginning,’ far-right Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache added.

I love that the Austria’s (democratically-elected) government is branded “far-right”, when a cursory examination of the parts of their platform not to do with immigration reveals that they’re about equivalent to centrist Democrats (if any such thing still exists) — i.e. closer to the sainted John F. Kennedy’s political philosophy than to anything truly rightwing.

And incidentally, please note the recent electoral victory by an anti-immigrant party in Slovenia (also once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

Anyway, needless to say that this attitude is pissing off the Muzzies, especially the Turks, who’ve been sponsoring these Islamist Fifth Columnist mullahs for decades.  Too bad, fuck ’em.  You’d think the “Gates Of Vienna” would have warned them, but they’re idiots.

Somebody pass the popcorn…

P.S.  If any person of the Disney-lawyerly-persuasion wants to take issue with the title of this post:  fuck you.  The expression predates Star Wars — and for that matter the entire Disney corporation — by over a thousand years (check Cicero’s writings), so if you think you have a copyright beef with me:  you don’t.