Categories
regulation

Gigless in Seattle

Seattle, minimum wage, regulations, bureaucracy, unintended consequences

A few years ago, Seattle imposed what amounted to a $26 an hour minimum wage for persons who deliver food for app-based services like DoorDash. Unfortunately for drivers, they don’t get paid this wage while waiting for the next order they can deliver.

Thanks to the new costs, customers say things like “I ordered a $12 sandwich. $12 grew to $32! I just deleted the app.”

Drivers say things like “Work has become slow because of the new law.” DoorDash reports 1.7 million fewer orders in Seattle in 2024. The new law took effect in January of that year. 

“These are unimaginably complicated markets where the company’s main job is interfacing between restaurants and delivery workers and customers,” explains economist and Manhattan Institute research director Judge Glock. “Then you have an economically illiterate city council or mayor who thinks, basically by looking at an industry through reading the news, they can appropriately regulate the exact wage.”

A former president of Seattle’s city council, Sara Nelson, says politicians caused a problem that must be fixed. By letting the market function? No, by “better” central planning, by fine-tuning the regulatory mechanism: “If we had gotten the minimum pay standard right, we would not see the decline in the revenue.”

The market did get it right. 

People who wanted flexible gig work got the work and got tips. Customers got the deliveries and gave tips. And companies had more freedom to adjust to changing markets. 

If Seattle wants to return to that happy situation, it must repeal the law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Tibor R. Machan

If one behaved as a good citizen or a charitable person simply because one was dreadfully scared of the state placing one in jail, one would not be a good citizen or person but barely more than a circus animal.

Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (1998), p. 11.
Categories
Today

Seventh of July

In 1456, a retrial verdict acquitted Joan of Arc of heresy 25 years after her execution.

In 1928 on July 7, sliced bread was sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.

On this date in 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act into law.

Categories
ideological culture regulation too much government

Air Conditioners — Threat or Menace?

U.K., Great Britain, global warming, climate, regulations

Is it selfish, asks Good Morning Britain, to want air conditioning?

Yes, it’s selfish to want to live and prosper and be comfortable in 90 degree heat. 

And this “selfish” cooling is bad because . . . ?

According to “the experts” queried by the Good Morning Britain presenters — which broadcasts using “non-green” energy — it’s bad because “we know” that the cooling of indoor air will heat up the outdoors — and therefore the planet.

Catastrophically, of course.

But we don’t know.

It’s one of many unproven assertions about the future of weather that get tossed around to make us feel guilty about not wanting to live in caves and eat dandelions. 

We do know that people deal capably with often extremely variable weather and other problems by using manmade food, shelter, clothing, and transportation — as well as cooling and heating. All highly suspect in the minds of Europe’s climate catastrophists. Who even attack farming.

Some climate autocrats in the UK are now actually making Brits take out their air conditioning units. Catastrophically, of course. One North London resident “was forced to ‘permanently remove’ two air-con units from the back of their home.” Council members ordained that there was “no justification” for the units. Another resident ordered to rip out his AC prevailed after appealing to a Planning Inspectorate — because he had solar panels.

“Air-con engineers told The Telegraph that they had been called out to remove perfectly operational units worth thousands of pounds across London.”

It’s a Blitz that the Brits are doing to themselves. Soon we’ll have to airlift the few who are still sane out of there. Think of it as a civilizational Dunkirk.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Robert Nozick

Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 2 : The State of Nature; Protective Associations, p. 14.
Categories
Today

Tyranny

The Sixth of July serves better as a “Today in Tyranny” marker than anything positive, at least when you consider these events:

  • 1415 — Jan Hus was burnt at the stake.
  • 1535 — Sir Thomas More was executed for treason against King Henry VIII of England.
  • 1887 — David Kalakaua, monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, was forced at gunpoint by Americans to sign the Bayonet Constitution giving Americans more power in Hawaii while stripping Hawaiian citizens of their rights.
  • 1939 — The Nazi “Third Reich” closed the last remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany.
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Update

Who Is Toxic Now, Really?

On Tuesday last week, Paul Jacob discussed the phenomenon of Europeans and other soccer — er, football — fans attending the World Cup games and getting to know Americans during and between gams, which occurred all over the states.

They were enthusiastic.

Like many other commentators, Paul quoted FreddyLA7, a Deutschländer who microblogged his American odyssey on X and became famous.

No sooner said than an emendation became necessary, for Freddy closed up his X account.

FreddyLA7 stated on Instagram Stories that he had planned to delete his X account at some point. His account’s deletion occurred shortly after Germany’s elimination from the World Cup, following a penalty shootout loss to Paraguay on June 29 (when Paul’s commentary was being prepped).

But there is more to the story: FreddyLA7 stated that the online response to his posts became “too toxic” and was “ruining the fun” of his travels, citing the platform’s toxicity and intense online backlash from the comment sections as reasons for deactivating his account.

All sorts of people — such as actor-author Stephen Fry — talk about how toxic X has become. They usually blame it on Elon Musk. Or, as in Fry’s case, “capitalism.” That is because it is leftists who make this complaint.

But it was not right-wing trolls who discouraged FreddyLA7. Everyone knows that. X may be toxic in varying ways, but the idea that the blame squarely falls upon conservatives and “reactionaries” and anti-leftists is preposterous. Freddy bugged the left because he was enthusing about America. And the left, today, tends to hate America . . . as well as the very kinds of Americans Freddy found charming.

“Too many people seem to have a problem with us having a genuinely good time here in the country,” said Freddy.

Categories
Today

July Fifth

The Liberty Bell left Philadelphia by special train on its way to the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, on July 5, 1915 — the last trip outside Philadelphia that the custodians of the bell intend to permit.

In 1937 on this date, Spam, the luncheon meat, was introduced into the market by the Hormel Foods Corporation.

The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 years, was formally certified by President Richard Nixon on July 5, 1971.

On July 5, 1995, Armenia adopted its constitution, four years after the country’s independence from the Soviet Union.

Categories
Thought

Aeschines

εὖ γὰρ ἴστε, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, ὅτι οὐχ αἱ παλαῖστραι
οὐδὲ τὰ διδασκαλεῖα οὐδ᾿ ἡ μουσικὴ μόνον παιδεύει
τοὺς νέους, ἀλλὰ πολὺ μᾶλλον τὰ δημόσια κηρύγματα.

For you are well aware that it is not only by bodily exercises, by educational institutions, or by lessons in music, that our youth are trained, but much more effectually by public examples.

Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon (330 BC), III.246.

Categories
video

Upon What Does Liberty Rest?

On Independence Day, perhaps consider upon what principles and habits of sociality liberty depends.

Here is food for that contemplation: