It probably doesn’t come as news that airline companies pay pilots more than cabin crew — but according to the dogma of the gender wage gap, we’re supposed to find this fact troubling. The British government now requires companies to report their raw gender gap — that is, the difference in the median hourly wages earned by their male and female employees. Ignoring occupational differences, seniority, employment history, hours worked, or any of the countless other factors affecting salaries, these data are misleading at best. Nevertheless, when budget airline EasyJet reported a 51 percent pay gap between its male and female employees, the company knew that its reputation perched on the edge of a PR abyss.
And that’s the whole point of the exercise: simplify statistics to shock people at the seeming injustice done to women and shame companies into action; refuse to compare similar job functions; ignore the fact that, like every other airline, EasyJet’s pilots are disproportionately male, while their cabin crews skew female; forget that almost all carriers compete for the same 4 percent of the world’s female pilots; and whatever you do, don’t mention that the EasyJet CEO, who was in charge of this bigoted organization and also its highest-paid employee until retiring earlier this year, was a woman. The company should be branded with a scarlet “51 percent” until it … does what? Cuts pilots’ pay? Hikes the salaries of female cabin crew? Hires male attendants instead of female? Goes bankrupt?
Kay S. Hymowitz, “Equal Pay Myths: Activists for wage parity ignore stubborn truths”, City Journal, 2018-04-09.
May 8, 2018
QotD: Pay inequality
May 4, 2018
QotD: The EU and democracy
The EU is quite clear however that it stands as the champion of democracy, just not the kind of democracy that involves people voting. No, for the EU democracy means compliance with the EU’s standards and rules – any departure indicates a drift towards un-democracy that must be checked by sanctions and punishments, even if people voted for it. The EU’s democratic principles, you understand, trump stuff like elections and voting; they are a purer form of democracy, crafted by unelected officials and demagogues free from popular approval. And yes, there are many in Brussels who actually believe all that.
Raedwald, “Sorry Herr Juncker your woes are just starting”, Raedwald, 2018-04-09.
April 24, 2018
The Windrush scandal in Britain
Brendan O’Neill discusses the bureaucratic idiocy that lead to thousands of people who’d been living and working in Britain are threatened with loss of jobs, loss of healthcare rights, and even deportation:
The Windrush scandal and its fallout might have exposed the incompetence of Theresa May and her political set. But it has done something far worse to Remainers. It has laid to waste their entire worldview. It has shattered their defining myth: that where they brave few are nice and pro-immigrant, the rest of the country, especially those little-educated inhabitants of ‘Brexitland’, are a seething pit of 1930s-style racism. In the palpable public discomfort with how the Windrush migrants have been treated, we see yet again what a libel this Remainer depiction of Brexit Britain has been.
For nearly two years, the liberal intelligentsia has talked about vast swathes of the electorate as a hateful throng whose prime motor is disgust with foreigners. These people yearn for a time when ‘faces were white’, says Vince Cable. The vote for Brexit was a ‘whitelash’, said Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, which was quite the slur against the one in three ethnic-minority voters who chose Brexit. These mad voters just want ‘less foreign-looking people on their streets’, said Diane Abbott. The police churned out ridiculous hate-crime stats, using entirely subjective criteria to declare there had been an outpouring of violent hate after the referendum, and columnists lapped it up. Brexit Britain was divided between an enlightened elite that doesn’t care about skin colour or national origins and the fever-minded masses who apparently think about little else.
It was a lie, of course, as many of us argued, and as many more should now see in the wake of the Windrush scandal. With every revelation of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean migrants, public displeasure grows. People can see the grave injustice of treating as criminals people who have been here since the 1940s and 50s and who were given leave to remain by an act of law in 1971. The way these Britons have been thrown out of their jobs or deprived of NHS care or in some cases deported — because rules introduced when Theresa May was home secretary stipulate that all migrants must now have official documentation — has grated with the populace. This was reflected in a poll published by iMix and the Runnymede Trust last week, which found that 60 per cent of Britons, rising to 71 per cent for over-65s, are opposed to what the government has done to the Windrush people. Those same over-65s who for the past two years have been talked about as racist scum by the Remainer chattering classes.
The Remainer elites’ religious conviction that huge parts of Britain are little more than racist-mobs-in-waiting is falling apart, fast. Even before the public concern with the mistreatment of the Windrush generations, there was the survey carried out by Open Europe at the end of last year which challenged the idea that the vote for Brexit was a ‘mandate to pull up the drawbridge’. On the contrary, many Britons still see the value in migration — they simply want some say over it, they want it to be a democratic concern. Open Europe found ‘little evidence’ that this ‘desire to control immigration’ was driven by ‘racism or xenophobia’. Even the EU now accepts Britons are not horrible racists. Its attitudes survey found the proportion of Brits who are ‘very positive’ or ‘fairly positive’ about migrants rose from 43 per cent to 63 per cent over the past four years, which includes the post-Brexit period when we were supposedly taking to the streets to bash a foreigner.
April 22, 2018
How to begin solving the common problems of big cities
Vladimir “Zeev” Vinokurov is writing about Australian cities in particular, but the same general analysis applies to many Canadian, American, and British urban areas as well:
… our economy and population are growing, and the resulting congestion is costing us thousands of dollars per year individually, and billions to the economy. It isolates us from family, friends and work. But cities can still grow without getting us stuck in traffic, missing increasingly overcrowded and delayed trains, or left unable to afford property. All this is happening because workplaces are too far from residents living in the suburbs, which effectively funnels residents into the inner city for work. It must change.
First, we must unwind planning laws that prevent offices, homes and apartments from being constructed alongside each other and throughout the city. These laws also raise housing prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second, instead of banning cars, charge commuters for using congested roads and trains. Third, stop supporting taxpayer funded ‘road to nowhere’ infrastructure projects. These reforms will cut congestion, grow the economy, cut living costs and reconnect us to family, friends and local communities.
Planning laws cause congestion and social isolation by preventing people from building apartments and commercial offices throughout our city. As a result, rents and property prices become dearer because not enough housing is built to accommodate demand from population growth. Indeed, Reserve Bank economists estimate that planning laws increase average property prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars. This drives residents into the outer suburbs to look for cheaper housing, even as they commute into the inner city for work. If more people lived close-by to their workplaces, commutes would be shorter.
We need multiple CBDs, not just one. Unwinding planning laws that prevent commercial growth outside the CBD will cut housing costs and rents, cut congestion and promote tightly knit, thriving urban communities.
Congestion also occurs because we pay for using roads and public transport with thousands of dollars of time every year, rather than money. Congested public roads or trains cost us no more money to use in peak times, and busier routes cost no more to use than empty ones. As a result, the Grattan Institute think tank estimates that the average Melbournian’s commute to the city is twice as long in peak time. By contrast, Sydney’s trains are less congested, but are used more widely compared to Melbourne’s because its tickets are dearer in rush hour. Congestion charges that reflect market demand for infrastructure will also encourage businesses to open in commercial districts outside the CBD. Reconnecting local commuters with local workplaces will save us time and money overall.
Congestion charges are also a fairer and cheaper way of funding infrastructure projects compared to taxes like fuel tax or stamp duty. Scrapping these two taxes could save property purchasers tens of thousands of dollars or more, and reduce petrol bills by at least a third. If we pay for congested roads and trains with money rather than time and taxes, we may end up paying less.
April 18, 2018
QotD: The United Nations
It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog faeces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: in the end, Saddam Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than Bush and Blair did.
And, of course, corrupt organisations rarely stop at just one kind. If you don’t want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food programme, don’t worry, whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits — in West Africa, it’s Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it’s drug dealing; in Kenya, it’s the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves.
Mark Steyn, “UN forces — just a bunch of thugs?”, Telegraph Online 2005-02-15
April 8, 2018
Brexit: Why Britain Left the European Union
PragerU
Published on 12 Mar 2018Is the European Union good for Europe? Or would Europeans be better off without it? Nigel Farage, a leader of the United Kingdom’s Brexit movement, shares his view.
Script:
If one big government is bad, imagine how much worse two big governments would be. But that’s what people living in Europe have had to deal with: their own nation’s bloated government and the super-national government of Europe, now known as the European Union. Bureaucracy times two! How’s that for a horror show?
Well, actually, you’ve no idea. It’s worse than you think. Believe me — I know, because for seventeen years, I’ve represented South East England as a member of the European Parliament, the EU’s legislative body. I was also leader of the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, where I lead Britain’s efforts to leave the European Union. To their everlasting credit, that’s just what happened on June the 23rd, 2016: The United Kingdom left the European Union. The world knows it as “Brexit.”
Brexit is a statement of national sovereignty. Don’t misunderstand me: I like nations. I like borders. I like the people that live within those borders making their own laws. But I don’t like it when faceless bureaucrats make laws for nations they don’t even live in.
But that’s what they do in the European Union.
Imagine a Belgian telling a Brit how much he can charge his customers — or the reverse. The EU bureaucrats do this in a myriad of different ways, all day, every day. It is a conspiracy of the elites.
Who are those elites? Well, they’re a bunch of self-important, overpaid, social engineers with useless college degrees who have never done a proper day’s work in their lives and have no connection with ordinary, decent people. I’ll take the good sense of an Italian farmer or a French baker over the arid intellectualism of an EU bureaucrat any day.
And I say these things not as an anti-European; I love Europe! It’s a fantastic, exciting, great continent: different peoples, languages, and cultures. But these peoples, with their languages and cultures, have effectively been hijacked by a giant, ever-expanding bureaucracy: the European Union.
People will say, “but isn’t there a parliament, a European parliament, that represents the people of Europe?” Well, yes, but this body has got no real power; it can’t make its own laws. Rather, the power resides with the European Commission. They’re unelected and they can’t be removed, and that’s how absurd the whole thing is.
The European Parliament meets in Brussels. At least, that’s what I thought when I was elected there. But once a month, do you know what happens? They load the contents of our offices and papers into big, plastic trunks, and they put those trunks on lorries, and they drive them nearly 400 miles down Europe’s motorways to a French city called Strasbourg where, for four days, the contents of our offices, and our papers, are put into a new office, and the parliament then sits there. Twelve times a year this back-and-forth happens, and this from an organization who say they want to reduce their level of carbon footprint! This, from an organization whose accounts have not been given a clean bill of health by the auditors for the last twenty years!
This…a parliament? It’s more like a traveling circus.
For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/brexit-why-britain-left-european-union
April 6, 2018
QotD: Bordertown, USA
Welcome to Bordertown, USA. Population: 200 million. Expect occasional temporary population increases from travelers arriving from other countries. Your rights as a US citizen are indeterminate within 100 miles of US borders. They may be respected. They may be ignored. But courts have decided that the “right” to do national security stuff — as useless as most its efforts are — trumps the rights of US citizens.
Tim Cushing, “Wall Street Journal Reporter Hassled At LA Airport; Successfully Prevents DHS From Searching Her Phones”, Techdirt, 2016-07-22.
March 31, 2018
QotD: Workshops and how to avoid them
Kingsley Amis, a man whom, for reasons neither interesting nor publishable, I did not much admire, once said that the word “workshop” summed up all that was wrong with the modern world. He was right, and his comment was both shrewd and prescient. Courses, conferences, away-days, workshops, team-building weekends – they’re all part of the same pathology, and they’ve spread like bacteria on agar gel.
With a regularity bordering on the boring, from many sources, I receive flyers offering me courses to improve myself. I am far from supposing that I cannot improve or be improved, but most of these courses seem more designed to relieve me of money than anything else. They come with pictures of the course leaders (or trainers), happy and smiling and, to my eyes at least, deeply crooked.
A learned journal to which I subscribe always arrives with invitations to courses and conferences. Some, naturally, are of interest: those given by people who are acknowledged experts in their field, and who will provide a convenient digest of the latest research in it. But a high proportion of them are about what one might call para-work: activity that has nothing, or something only very tangential, to do with the ostensible aims of one’s profession.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Workshops and why you must avoid them”, The Social Affairs Unit, 2009-11-18.
March 22, 2018
Unaccountable federal agency refuses to answer to the senator who wanted it to be unaccountable in the first place
Perhaps this is a teaching moment for Senator Elizabeth Warren, says A. Barton Hinkle:
If Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had taken a page out of Virginia Delegate Nick Freitas’ book, she might not be in the pickle she is today.
Warren is spitting mad at Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director who does double duty heading up an agency whose creation Warren championed: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB’s previous director was an ideological ally of Warren. Since Mulvaney took over, Warren has ripped the agency’s decisions. Warren said Mulvaney is giving “the middle finger” to consumers, and she railed at Mulvaney’s indifferent response to the 10 (!) letters she has sent him demanding answers to more than 100 questions.
The other day she tweeted that she is giving Mulvaney “one last chance.” Yet as The Wall Street Journal points out, she has only herself to blame for her apparent impotence.
Time and again during debate over the CFPB, conservatives and libertarians warned that its powers were too great and that its accountability to the other branches of government was too limited. But that was just the way Warren and other supporters wanted things. Neither Congress nor other political forces could influence an unaccountable regulatory agency. Now Warren finds herself thwarted by the very lack of oversight she championed.
Be careful what you wish for.
[…]
Philosopher John Rawls famously invented a mechanism for doing just that: the “veil of ignorance”: If you are designing the rules for a society, you should assume that you know nothing about your place in that society. If your race, age, physical abilities, mental prowess, and so forth are all a complete mystery, then you are likely to design a political-economic system that is fair to all. Just in case you wind up at the bottom of the social pile.
Having a president who makes policy through signing statements, his “pen and phone,” and other forms of executive action, for example, seems brilliant when the opposing party controls Congress. It seems less so when the opposing party controls the White House.
Should intelligence agencies keep tabs on Islamists who might pose a threat of domestic terrorism? Then don’t be surprised if a different administration turns the focus to right-wing militias.
March 13, 2018
Trump Is ‘Destroying’ Regulations
ReasonTV
Published on 12 Mar 2018The president’s first year of slowing down regulations shattered previous records. But will politics and legislative inaction stall things from here?
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With his tariffs on aluminum and steel, family-separating crackdowns on nonviolent illegal immigrants, and authoritarian musings about executing drug dealers, President Donald Trump can be a libertarian’s nightmare.Except when it comes to regulatory reform.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a Washington, D.C.-based free market think tank that focuses on the administrative state, tallied up the number of regulations in Trump’s first year in office and found, “This is the lowest count since records began being kept in the mid-1970s.” CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews told Reason that, “I haven’t seen personally anything like the regulatory reductions that have taken place.”
What’s producing these results? In part, the president’s early executive orders mandating that with every new regulation two old ones get killed, and that the net imposed regulatory cost of each agency and department be zero. Trump has also appointed some real reformers to change the way the executive branch does business: Scott Gottlieb at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Ajit Pai at the Federal Communications Commission, Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education, and Rick Perry at the Department of Energy.
Chief among the anti-bureaucratic bureaucrats is Neomi Rao, administrator of the obscure-sounding but important Office for Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which applies cost-benefit analyses to proposed regulation while making sure it still aligns with legislative intent. Rao, who came to the administration after founding the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, tells Reason that, “We have done more in our first year than any president since we’ve been keeping records, which is back to Reagan.”
President Trump appears genuinely enthusiastic about this push, talking up FDA reforms in both of his State of the Union addresses, and crowing at a December red-tape-cutting ceremony that, “The never-ending growth of red tape in America has come to a sudden screeching and beautiful halt.”
But Crews warns that a midterm will be much harder for Trump to navigate than the comparative honeymoon of 2017. “I think in 2018, he’s going to have a much tougher time meeting the goal,” Crews said. “When you’re acting alone as president and you can’t make law on your own, the barrier that you run into is you run out of low-hanging fruit.”
Produced by Matt Welch and Alexis Garcia. Camera by Todd Krainin, Ian Keyser, Mark McDaniel, and Jim Epstein.
February 21, 2018
QotD: Regulation
… “regulation” could also be described as high-handed and ignorant interference in the mutually advantageous deals contracted voluntarily among the miserable serfs of the state, interference at best inspired by antique theories of natural monopoly and using antique policies appropriate to obsolete technologies, and at worst by conspiracies to benefit existing rich people, backed by state violence. Much of regulation, looked at coldly, would fall under such a definition, if not immediately on its passage, then after a few years of technological change or regulatory capture.
Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality, 2016.
February 18, 2018
The legal loophole that allows profiteering scumbags like Martin Shkreli to gouge the public
The US pharmaceutical market is a long way from a freely competitive environment, largely due to the amount of regulatory oversight required by lawmakers and enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Among all the regulatory checks and balances, there’s one weird trick that allows predatory companies to reap excess profits legally — the “restricted distribution” loophole:
For immunocompromised adult patients who have the toxoplasmosis parasite, the FDA recommends taking 50 to 75 milligrams of Daraprim a day for up to three weeks, followed by half that dosage for an additional four to five weeks. So at the high end, an adult course of Daraprim therapy for a U.S. patient used to cost around $1,350 total.
While that might not seem cheap, it was a drop in the bucket compared to the cost after Turing Pharmaceuticals, Shkreli’s company, bought the rights to Daraprim and jacked the price up to $750 per pill in 2015. That move increased the cost of one course of treatment to around $75,000.
At that point you might have expected another company to jump in and start offering a generic version of the drug. But Shkreli used a regulatory loophole to keep that from happening.
You see, when a generic manufacturer wants to create a cheap version of a branded drug, it has to buy thousands of doses from the manufacturer in order to run comparison tests. Generic manufacturers use the results of these tests to prove to the FDA that their version is identical to the branded drug that the agency has already approved.
More often than not, the company that holds the marketing and distribution rights to a branded drug will sell those comparison doses to the generic manufacturer without being obstructionist, because that’s the trade-off for receiving a 20-year monopoly by way of a drug patent: The branded manufacturer gets to charge whatever they want for years and years without facing competition, and in exchange for that government-backed monopoly, it’s supposed to sell equivalency samples to generic companies.
But what if the company is run by an unscrupulous asshole like Martin Shkreli? Then it might opt to put the drug into what’s called “restricted distribution,” which means no distributor anywhere can sell comparison samples to a generic manufacturer.
The FDA originally created the concept of restricted distribution to limit the availability of drugs that might be dangerous. Methadone, for instance, was first approved in the 1940s as a painkiller. In the 1970s, the FDA restricted its availability because regulators didn’t want the opioid used for anything other than the treatment of opioid dependence. Even today, methadone can be dispensed only in highly regulated settings and only for one approved reason.
In 2007, Congress empowered the FDA to create an entire system of safety controls beyond restricted distribution, and the agency now requires the manufacturers of certain substances to develop Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) to prevent misuse and abuse of potentially problematic compounds.
The list of approved drugs that the FDA says must have an REMS is here. Daraprim is not on that list. You can’t get high off it. It’s not habit forming. Yes, the FDA label says it can be carcinogenic after long periods of use, and that it might cause birth defects if used in high doses by pregnant women. These potential effects are serious, but there is no post-market data suggesting that Daraprim is causing more harm than benefit in the intended patient population. Shkreli’s company put Daraprim into restricted distribution to boost their profits, not protect patients.
February 2, 2018
QotD: Infrastructural sclerosis
I have an op-ed in the Boston Globe today on infrastructure, addressing the issue of quality rather than quantity of investment. Rachel Lipson, a graduate student at Harvard, and I describe the fiasco that has emerged from what should have been a routine maintenance project on the Anderson Memorial Bridge over the Charles River next to my office in Cambridge. Though the bridge took only 11 months to build in 1912, it will take close to five years to repair today at a huge cost in dollars and mass delays.
Investigating the reasons behind the bridge blunders have helped to illuminate an aspect of American sclerosis — a gaggle of regulators and veto players, each with the power to block or to delay, and each with their own parochial concerns. All the actors — the historical commission, the contractor, the environmental agencies, the advocacy groups, the state transportation department — are reasonable in their own terms, but the final result is wildly unreasonable.
At one level this explains why, despite the overwhelming case for infrastructure investment, there is so much resistance from those who think it will be carried out ineptly. The right response is to advocate for reforms in procurement policies, regulatory policies and government procedures to make the investment process more efficient and effective. This is all clear enough.
At another level, though, our story may illustrate phenomena that go way beyond infrastructure. I’m a progressive, but it seems plausible to wonder if government can build a nation abroad, fight social decay, run schools, mandate the design of cars, run health insurance exchanges, or set proper sexual harassment policies on college campuses, if it can’t even fix a 232-foot bridge competently. Waiting in traffic over the Anderson Bridge, I’ve empathized with the two-thirds of Americans who distrust government.
Larry Summers, “Why Americans don’t trust government”, Washington Post, 2016-05-26.
February 1, 2018
The Government is Going to Shut Down Again (And That’s Bad)
ReasonTV
Published on 31 Jan 2018System failures are a false path to limited government.
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Libertarians want to shrink the government, but a shutdown is little cause for celebration. Hitting a giant “pause” button on federal agencies won’t end the drug war or reform entitlements. A government shutdown doesn’t even save money. Back pay to furloughed federal employees ensures that taxpayers pay just as much as they would have if the government had proceeded as normal. But during a shutdown taxpayers don’t receive the government services they’re paying for, and the economy takes a hit from the disruption.
In the latest “Mostly Weekly,” Andrew Heaton explains why libertarians should be against the next government shutdown.
Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind. Special appearance by Brian Sack.
Script by Andrew Heaton with writing assistance from Sarah Rose Siskind and Brian Sack
Edited by Austin Bragg and Sarah Rose Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: “Frozen” by Surfer Blood.
January 30, 2018
QotD: Worstall’s Law of Organizations
I would, and do, argue that this is, in fact, the inevitable fate of all and any organizations, so much so that we might call it Worstall’s Law of Organizations, perhaps a minor corollary to Parkinson’s Laws. All and any organizations will in the end be run by those who stay awake in committee. A brief survey of the world around us will show that this is a simple and obvious truth.
Tim Worstall, “‘Any Organization Will, In the End, Be Run By Those Who Stay Awake in Committee'”, Ideas in Action, 2005-06-23.
