Coyote Blog

New York is proposing a $15 minimum wage for any fast-food restaurants that are part of a national chain with 30 or more stores.  How this survives any sort of equal protection test is beyond me -- if I own a restaurant and call it "coyote's place" I don't have to pay $15, but if I own a single restaurant where I pay franchise fees to McDonald's, I do.

Let's leave the inevitable court challenges on fairness aside.  Of all the possible industries, I wonder why the focus on just fast food and on just large franchises.  Some of it is obviously mindless Progressive soak the rich thinking, and some of it is a liberal distaste for any foods that are not kale.  Is it just because the fast food workers have been the most vocal?  If so, that is pretty lame the the government is merely focusing on the squeaky wheel, a real indictment of any pretensions technocratic politicians have to legislating intelligently.

But I wonder if it is something else.  Pick a progressive on the street, and in the unlikely event they can name any economic study, that study will probably be Card and Krueger's study of the effect of a minimum wage increase in New Jersey.   Sixty bazillion studies have confirmed what most of us know in our bones to be true, that raising the price of labor decreases demand for that labor.  Card and Krueger said it did not -- and that a minimum wage increase may have even increased demand for labor -- which pretty much has made it the economic bible of the Progressive Left.

What intrigues me is that Card and Krueger specifically looked at the effect of the minimum wage on large chain fast food stores.  In this study (I will explain the likely reason in a moment) they found that when the minimum wage increased for all businesses in New Jersey, the employment at large chain fast food restaurants went up.

So I wonder if the Progressives making this ruling in New York thought to themselves -- "we want to raise the minimum wage.  Well, the one place where we KNOW it will have no negative effect from Card and Krueger is on large fast food chains, so...."

By the way, there are a lot of critiques of Card & Krueger's study.  The most powerful in my mind is that when a minimum wage is raised, often the largest volume and highest productivity companies in any given business will absorb it the best.  One explanation of the Card & Krueger result is that the minimum wage slammed employment in small ma and pa restaurants, driving business to the larger volume restaurants and chains.  As a whole, in this theory, the industry saw a net loss in employment and a shift in employment from smaller to larger firms.  By measuring only the effect on larger firms, Card and Krueger completely missed what was going on.

John Hinderaker had an article titled "THE TIMES GOES KNOW-NOTHING ON IMMIGRATION".  In it, he criticizes the New York Times' for being too supportive of open immigration.  He proceeds to point out what he believes to be serious negatives of immigration.

I won't go back to my defenses of immigration today.  But I did find his article title ironic.  Was it purposefully so?  I can't imagine that it was.  The word "Know-Nothing" is most associated in American History with the Know Nothing party, formerly the Native American party (meaning "native" white folks, not indigenous peoples).  As you might guess from the name, their main rallying cry was to limit or stop immigration -- at the time their ire was mainly aimed at the Irish.

This is obviously ironic because from historical use, it is Hinderaker that is going know-nothing, not the Times.   And further ironic because the Irish, whom the Know Nothings wanted to keep out, now are considered by most Conservatives to be part of the backbone of America that is being threatened by all these new immigrants.  Most of the arguments he uses against immigrants are virtually identical to those used, and since proven incorrect, by the Know Nothings in the 19th century.

Postscript:  The term Know-Nothing, if I remember right, came not because they were ignorant, but because they tended to be very secretive.  When asked about their party, they would answer that they know nothing (this works best for those who watched Hogan's Heroes and can say this in a sergeant Schultz voice; if you are too young for Hogan's Heroes, then imitating Ygritte in GOT is acceptable).

John Hinderaker laments

Harvard’s Institute of Politics released a poll yesterday that showed millennials’ trust in government at a historic low. This chart shows how many respondents said that they trust the entity in question to do the right thing either all of the time or most of the time. Notably, 20% of millennials said they trust the federal government to do the right thing; 32% said they trust the president; and 14% trust Congress. State and local governments (and, appallingly, the United Nations) fared a little better, but distrust of government is clearly the order of the day....

Which raises, not for the first time, a question I can’t answer: why do people who don’t trust government keep voting for more of it? For a long time, young people have voted mostly Democrat. Which means they are voting to give more of their money, and more control over their lives, to government–especially the federal government. Why would they do that, if only 20% of them trust the federal government to do the right thing?

I won't give a simplistic answer to a complex social issue, but I have a theory that explains at least part of this: gay marriage and other social issues.  I get a chance to work with young people a lot, and generally they don't seem to be focused on tax and regulatory issues.  They haven't been deep enough into the productive economy (and many will be convinced by their universities never to enter the productive economy) to understand the effects of government interventionism in the economy.

But one thing young people do know is that they are absolutely turned off by the social conservatism of Republicans.  I read an article the other day by a Conservative lamenting that young people use certain political positions as social status symbols, as self-identifiers that they are among the elite.  But certain ideas also have the opposite affect, acting as a big scarlet A that no one would willingly wear.  Among those are opposition to gay marriage, for example.  Many young folks, regardless of their position on anything else, would be as unlikely to vote for someone who opposed gay marriage as would be a Victorian society woman to openly admit she was a prostitute.  There are certain social positions that many Republicans hold that are complete non-starters to young people, such that they could not consider voting for such a politician even if they agreed with 99% of all the politician's other positions.  This tendency is reinforced by college professors, overwhelmingly of the Left, who tell kids that Republicans are not just people with whom they disagree, but bad people who have no place in civil society.

A year or so ago I got tapped to lead an all-too-brief center-right effort in Arizona to legalize gay marriage.  I cannot tell you how many Republican leaders and politicians came to me in private and thanked us for what we were doing, saying that the Republican party has to be saved from itself.  In the end, we eventually shut the effort down because prominent groups on the Left didn't want a center-right group to get any of the credit.  Some of them wanted the effort to go forward, but only if non-Leftists would bow out of the leadership group, and some said explicitly that they did not want the issue solved yet, because the Democrats wanted to flip Arizona blue in 2014 and 2016 and they needed the gay marriage issue to run on, knowing it was a way to pull otherwise libertarian leaning young people away from the Republicans.

Update:  I would add that opposition to gay marriage among Republicans also poisons young people to other Republican positions, such as smaller government and free markets (though this libertarian would argue that such Republican positions are often in name only, and not consistently followed, but that is another rant).   The biggest lie every person in this country is taught is that somehow Republicans and Democrats offer opposing and internally consistent positions on a political spectrum that only has two dimensions.  So if we don't know much about politics but KNOW Republicans have one really bad position, then the whole package must be bad and we should vote Democrat.  Which causes us to start self-justifying support for things like economic interventionism that we may not know much about but now is part of our team's position.

So I won't.  Which doesn't mean I haven't found all the squirming on multiple web sites immensely entertaining.  Jeff Goldstein, as is often the case, is perhaps the most entertaining.  While Jeff will never be invited to speak at a MoveOn rally, on the other hand it is about as easy to lump him in with Pat Robertson as to group "Little House on the Prairie" into a double feature with "Team America World Police."

Though I am not convinced it is an especially apt comparison for the Coulter remark, I did particularly note one observation.  Goldstein's commenter said, in part, this:

I am reminded of the whole "niggardly" thing.  Of course, we KNOW what
it means.  But, you cannot really use it unless you want to be
misunderstood and have your message distracted.

Jeff responded:

This is, of course, quite stunning and more than a bit dangerous to the cause of liberalism.

I mean, look again at what Steve just argued:  "Of course, we KNOW what
it means.  But, you cannot really use it unless you want to be
misunderstood and have your message distracted."

Translation: We know what it means, but we must assume nobody else does.  Therefore, their misunderstanding is to be countenanced and massaged"”which, in effect, empowers ignorance
rather than treating it as ignorance.  It is the perfect example of the
intellectual welfare state:  rather than working to force people to
break out a dictionary, we'd rather provide them with succor because,
well, they can't really be expected to learn things on their own,
right?  Those kinds of people?

I don't read Protein Wisdom all the time, so I am not sure if "intellectual welfare" is a term Goldstein uses a lot.  I coined it independently a few years ago, when discussing social security.