Quotulatiousness

April 20, 2020

The four distinct phases of the Great Depression in the United States

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An older post from Lawrence W. Reed at the Foundation for Economic Education outlines the low points of the Great Depression and debunks a few widely held myths about that cataclysmic economic era:

Phase 1, the Federal Reserve and the end of the Roaring 20’s:

One of the most thorough and meticulously documented accounts of the Fed’s inflationary actions prior to 1929 is America’s Great Depression by the late Murray Rothbard. Using a broad measure that includes currency, demand and time deposits, and other ingredients, Rothbard estimated that the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by more than 60 percent from mid-1921 to mid-1929. The flood of easy money drove interest rates down, pushed the stock market to dizzy heights, and gave birth to the “Roaring Twenties.”

By early 1929, the Federal Reserve was taking the punch away from the party. It choked off the money supply, raised interest rates, and for the next three years presided over a money supply that shrank by 30 percent. This deflation following the inflation wrenched the economy from tremendous boom to colossal bust.

The “smart” money — the Bernard Baruchs and the Joseph Kennedys who watched things like money supply — saw that the party was coming to an end before most other Americans did. Baruch actually began selling stocks and buying bonds and gold as early as 1928; Kennedy did likewise, commenting, “only a fool holds out for the top dollar.”

Phase 2, Hoover’s interventions and the disaster of Smoot-Hawley:

Willis C. Hawley (left) and Reed Smoot in April 1929, shortly before the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act passed the House of Representatives.
Library of Congress photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Unemployment in 1930 averaged a mildly recessionary 8.9 percent, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. It shot up rapidly until peaking out at more than 25 percent in 1933. Until March 1933, these were the years of President Herbert Hoover — the man that anti-capitalists depict as a champion of noninterventionist, laissez-faire economics.

Did Hoover really subscribe to a “hands off the economy,” free-market philosophy? His opponent in the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt, didn’t think so. During the campaign, Roosevelt blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, choking off trade, and putting millions of people on the dole. He accused the president of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.” Contrary to the modern myth about Hoover, Roosevelt and Garner were absolutely right.

The crowning folly of the Hoover administration was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed in June 1930. It came on top of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, which had already put American agriculture in a tailspin during the preceding decade. The most protectionist legislation in U.S. history, Smoot-Hawley virtually closed the borders to foreign goods and ignited a vicious international trade war. Professor Barry Poulson notes that not only were 887 tariffs sharply increased, but the act broadened the list of dutiable commodities to 3,218 items as well.

Officials in the administration and in Congress believed that raising trade barriers would force Americans to buy more goods made at home, which would solve the nagging unemployment problem. They ignored an important principle of international commerce: trade is ultimately a two-way street; if foreigners cannot sell their goods here, then they cannot earn the dollars they need to buy here.

Phase 3, FDR and the New Deal:

Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election in a landslide, collecting 472 electoral votes to just 59 for the incumbent Herbert Hoover. The platform of the Democratic Party whose ticket Roosevelt headed declared, “We believe that a party platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully kept by the party entrusted with power.” It called for a 25 percent reduction in federal spending, a balanced federal budget, a sound gold currency “to be preserved at all hazards,” the removal of government from areas that belonged more appropriately to private enterprise, and an end to the “extravagance” of Hoover’s farm programs. This is what candidate Roosevelt promised, but it bears no resemblance to what President Roosevelt actually delivered.

In the first year of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed spending $10 billion while revenues were only $3 billion. Between 1933 and 1936, government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent. Federal debt skyrocketed by 73 percent.

[…] in 1935 the Works Progress Administration came along. It is known today as the very government program that gave rise to the new term, “boondoggle,” because it “produced” a lot more than the 77,000 bridges and 116,000 buildings to which its advocates loved to point as evidence of its efficacy. The stupefying roster of wasteful spending generated by these jobs programs represented a diversion of valuable resources to politically motivated and economically counterproductive purposes.

The American economy was soon relieved of the burden of some of the New Deal’s excesses when the Supreme Court outlawed the NRA in 1935 and the AAA in 1936, earning Roosevelt’s eternal wrath and derision. Recognizing much of what Roosevelt did as unconstitutional, the “nine old men” of the Court also threw out other, more minor acts and programs which hindered recovery.

Phase 4, the Wagner Act:

The stage was set for the 1937–38 collapse with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 — better known as the Wagner Act and organized labor’s “Magna Carta.” […] Armed with these sweeping new powers, labor unions went on a militant organizing frenzy. Threats, boycotts, strikes, seizures of plants, and widespread violence pushed productivity down sharply and unemployment up dramatically. Membership in the nation’s labor unions soared; by 1941 there were two and a half times as many Americans in unions as in 1935.

[…]

Higgs draws a close connection between the level of private investment and the course of the American economy in the 1930s. The relentless assaults of the Roosevelt administration — in both word and deed — against business, property, and free enterprise guaranteed that the capital needed to jumpstart the economy was either taxed away or forced into hiding. When Roosevelt took America to war in 1941, he eased up on his antibusiness agenda, but a great deal of the nation’s capital was diverted into the war effort instead of into plant expansion or consumer goods. Not until both Roosevelt and the war were gone did investors feel confident enough to “set in motion the postwar investment boom that powered the economy’s return to sustained prosperity.”

January 24, 2020

How Left/Right Partisanship Starts a Civil War in Spain | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1936 Part 2 of 4

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 23 Jan 2020

Spain in the early 1930’s was practically Europe in Microcosm, with numerous political and ideological movements clashing in debate and open battles on the streets of Spain. All of this worsened in 1936 as Spain slowly descends into Civil War.

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Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Dawn Of Civilization” – Jo Wandrini
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
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– “Deflection” – Reynard Seidel
– “Death And Glory 2” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan Eriksson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
1 day ago (edited)
Vote on what we’re doing after B2W! -> https://www.patreon.com/posts/33300161

We originally planned to just do one episode on the Spanish Civil War, but the more I researched it the more I realized how complicated everything was even before the real fighting even breaks out. To understand the battle-lines of the conflict you have to understand how they were drawn in the turbulent years of the Second Spanish Republic. In the space of just 5 years it sees numerous insurrections, revolutions, and a coup. In an era of political radicalism across the world, Spain really stands out as the most defined by it, and by 1936 is already in a state of quasi-civil war. This episode gives you a detailed insight into that. We’ll be covering the course of the war itself in a later episode.
Cheers, Francis.

January 19, 2020

Travelling SNCF in the age of the smartphone app

Filed under: Business, France, Humour, Media, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Register, Alistair Dabbs reveals some unfortunate truths about the French railway service (the Société nationale des chemins de fer français or SNCF) and its mobile app:

An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, 1May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.

Actually, the hotel app is rubbish. The booking system is slow, the property information incomplete and some of the buttons don’t do anything at all. From time to time, the app flashes up a notification inviting you to install the app … er, that you’re already running. Much better to book using a proper computer. Still, flashing the screen around got me the Presidential Disability Suite. Franklin D rocked a wheelchair, remember, and I’m a fan.

This, however, pales into insignificance with the tedious and frankly silly collection of smartphone apps I had to juggle to manage my train journey to get here. Yes, it’s my own fault for trying to navigate my way across France on public transport in the midst of a general strike but surely that’s precisely the kind of thing digital communications ought to be able to help you with, don’t you agree?

Map of the French railways on which the TGV (LGV: blue; normal tracks: black) and Intercités (grey) SNCF trains run. Only lines going to and from Paris are shown here.
Wikimedia Commons.

The French train company, SNCF, has been doing its best by notifying travellers with bookings every day at 17:00 which of the following day’s trains would be running and which would be cancelled. I’m a lifelong union member myself and I fully support the workers’ rights to … oh buggeration, my TGV’s been rerouted to set off from a city 300km away. Fucking union arsewipes – sack ’em all bastard wankers.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just have to work out another way. Fire up the SNCF booking app!

A banner at the top informs me that I should seek information about which train services are running by checking its Twitter feed. So I launch the Twitter app. SNCF on Twitter says I should check via the idiotic INOUI brand for TGV bookings. So I launch the INOUI app. This tells me I should check with SNCF or, if I want more information, click on a highlighted link. I click on it: it links to a one-sentence message that tells me there is a strike on and that train services may be affected.

Two hours of thumb-numbing smartphone tomfoolery later, I have worked out my own alternative route via multiple connecting services. This was made more challenging by the SNCF and INOUI apps providing contradictory information about the same journey. Best of all is they can’t agree on where my TGV will actually go. Will it reach its terminus as usual or will it apparently go inexplicably missing from the tracks in the countryside outside Lille? According to SNCF and INOUI, it will do both. It’s Schrodinger’s train.

Just as I go to bed, the Eurostar app sends me a notification reminding me to get to my local station on time tomorrow to catch the TGV that’s been cancelled.

As you can see, my much prolonged, zig-zag route up the country and into Blighty worked, no thanks to these ridiculous apps. It wasn’t all bad: I got to see more French farmland than I expected and experienced first-hand the extraordinarily rich cultural variety of train station beggars that France has to offer the modern rail traveller.

August 30, 2019

Communist Revolution in America? – The Red Scare 1919 I THE GREAT WAR 1919

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 29 Aug 2019

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The American intervention in the Russian Civil War, the economic hardships of workers and returning veterans and the strikes all over the US in 1919 created a hysteria that we know as Red Scare today. But how realistic was the idea of a Bolshevist revolution in America really?

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» SOURCES
US Congress. Senate. Bolshevik Propaganda: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary. 65th Cong., 3rd sess., February 11, 1919, to March 10, 1919
Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Revised edition. South End Press, 1997.
Hanson, Ole. Americanism versus Bolshevism. New York and London: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1920.
United States Department of Justice. Red Radicalism as Described by Its Own Leaders, Exhibits Collected by A. Mitchell Palmer, Including Various Communist Manifestos, Constitutions, Plans, and Purposes of the Proletariat Revolution, and Its Seditious Propaganda. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920.
Cocks, Catherine, Peter C. Holloran, Alan Lessloff. The A to Z of the Progressive Era. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009.
Dick, William M. Labor and Socialism in America. New York: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Gould, Lewis L. The Progressive Era. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1974.
Hagedorn, Ann. Hope and Fear in America: 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Jaffe, Julian F. Crusade Against Radicalism: New York During the Red Scare, 1914-1924. New York: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Kornweibel, Jr., Theodore. “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. Indianapolis: Indiana Press University, 1998.
Hawley, Ellis W. The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933. New York St Martin’s Press, 1979.
Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study of National Hysteria, 1919-1920. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.
Powers, Richard Gid. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. Yale University Press, 1998.

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All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2019

August 24, 2019

QotD: Strikes at non-profit organizations

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The usual argument in favour of union power and the right to strike and so on is that the workers have to be able to band together to beat back the concentrated power of the capitalists. I’m all in favour of the freedom of association, considering it just as important as the freedom of speech so unions themselves hold no terrors for me. But that standard case that labour must be protected, protect itself perhaps, from the profit gouging activities of the owners rather fails when there are no profits, are no owners trying to maximise them as they grind the workers into the dust. Which is what we see here at National Public Radio. There’s the threat of a strike in the air and yes, it’s about pay scales. But there just aren’t any greedy plutocrats to take the cash from, nor are there any taking anything at present. Thus we see the finances of an organisation in a rather more stark manner.

[…]

Which is where we get to see the pay deal matter in the raw. At the auto companies (well, absent those in and near bankruptcy problems) it was indeed possible to start shouting “But what about the workers?” Why should they get less generous pay or terms just so that the capitalists can make out like bandits? But here we’ve got exactly the same problem. And there are no capitalists, there are no profits. The income into NPR is pretty much exclusively used to pay the employees of NPR. There are no leakages to the capitalists so, in the absence of more money, what can be done?

[…]

You can see NPR’s finances here and it becomes obvious that they have available only two of the traditional three ways of dealing with a higher wage bill. In for profit companies there is that possibility of reducing the profit to pay the workers more. In the absence of profiteering this cannot of course happen. Thus, in order to accommodate higher wages they can either raise prices to stations which carry the programs or NPR can employ fewer people at those higher wages. They’re restricted to only two of those ways normally put forward. Something which does rather aid in highlighting why and how companies, for profit ones, react the way they do to forced pay rises.

That NPR is a non-profit aids in highlighting exactly the problems that all organisations have with demands for higher wages. With no profits to cut they can either charge more or employ fewer people, nothing else.

Tim Worstall, “NPR’s Problems – Isn’t It Fun When Workers At A Non-Profit Seek To Strike?”, Forbes, 2017-07-15.

February 24, 2019

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Warners (Part 3/2)

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindsay Ellis
Published on 20 Apr 2018

Nothing is pure.

From the comments:

Special Agent Washing Tub
2 months ago

Me; * watching this and feeling my childhood shatter*
“Why does it hurt so much?”
Lindsay: “BECAUSE IT WAS REAL.”

November 25, 2018

“They said Trudeau was going to be a uniter, but what an accomplishment”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Calgary this week, just as the city council officially buried its Olympic bid (but somehow decided to try to keep the subsidies from other levels of government for that event). His visit was the target of protests from both organized labour and Albertans angry about the federal government’s part in keeping Alberta oil from getting to market:

The prime minister flew into Calgary on Thursday to meet with Mayor Nenshi, chat with the Chamber of Commerce, and have photos taken at the site of new social housing being built partly on Ottawa’s dime. The PM left no word on what he thought of the whole “let’s buy Calgary an Olympics without going to the trouble of having one” concept. There were unexpected distractions at every turn in Calgary, the main one being a fierce protest outside his temporary headquarters at the downtown Hyatt.

The Herald’s agreed-upon estimate of the size of the anti-Trudeau protest was two thousand people. I am not sure I trust their math, but at any rate the crowd was large enough to snarl traffic and intimidate the police. I say “crowd,” but perhaps the word should be “crowds,” because the protest was actually twofold.

The striking Canadian Union of Postal Workers was there to discourage Trudeau from passing the back-to-work legislation his cabinet is cooking up. And there was also a coinciding protest over the landlocking of Alberta’s oil, which has widened the spread between world oil prices and local spot prices to surreal, unimagined heights. The sluggishness of pipeline construction has left Alberta hydrocarbons all but worthless. And now the world price is tottering from medium-high levels, ending a sunshiny global oil season from which the province got no advantage.

The posties’ chants of “Negotiate!” alternated with the militant oilpatch’s cries of “Build that pipe!” In a way the spectacle was touching. Here, in the streets of Calgary, you had one of the most internationalist and red-dyed corners of Canadian organized labour literally joining forces with its mostly non-union, mostly right-wing working-class brethren. They said Trudeau was going to be a uniter, but what an accomplishment.

This solidarity will, of course, be fleeting. CUPW, having played the Grinch successfully, will either cut a deal or take its medicine when the back-to-work law passes. But Calgary’s resentment of Trudeau will not be so quick to evaporate — nor, perhaps, will the images of our young prime minister facing a display of active mass public hostility for the first time.

October 29, 2018

The $15 Minimum Wage Is Turning Hard Workers Into Black Market Lawbreakers

Filed under: Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ReasonTV
Published on 11 Oct 2018

An in-depth look at New York’s car wash industry, and the real world consequences of politicians interfering with a complex industry they don’t understand.

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

—————-

On March 4, 2015, a group of union leaders, activists, and elected officials were arrested for blocking traffic during a protest in front of a Vegas Auto Spa, a small car wash in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Chanting “No contract, no peace!” and “Si se puede!,” they had come in support of striking workers, who had walked out demanding a union contract after allegedly being subjected to dismal working conditions.

For David Mertz, the New York City director and a vice president at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), it was an inspirational moment in an ambitious six-year campaign to unionize the city’s car washes industry.

“These workers were willing to stand out there during one of the coldest winters … literally in decades to fight for their rights and for basic human dignity,” says Mertz, who was also arrested that day. “You have the ability to make change by coming together, and when you do that sometimes you find that you’ve got some friends on your side.”

In the past six years, the car wash industry, which employs low-skilled, mostly immigrant workers, has also been the target of lawsuits for alleged underpayment of wages, including a handful of cases spearheaded by the New York State Attorney General’s office. Working conditions in the industry were also cited as a raison d’être in the successful campaign to raise the state minimum wage to $15 per hour, which takes full effect at New York City car washes in January of 2019.

As Reason chronicled in a feature story in our July 2016 issue, the real world impact of the unionization drive, the lawsuits, and the $15 minimum wage has been mainly to push car washes to automate and to close down.

Two years later, there are more unintended consequences. The $15 minimum wage is fostering a growing black market—workers increasingly have no choice but to ply their trade out of illegal vans parked on the street, because the minimum wage has made it illegal for anyone to hire them at the market rate.

The minimum wage is also cartelizing the industry: Businesses that have chosen to automate are benefiting from the $15 wage floor because outlawing cheap labor makes it harder for new competitors to undercut them on price and service.

As a sequel to the 2016 article, this video takes an in-depth look at the real world consequences that result when politicians interfere with a complex industry they don’t understand, enabled by media coverage that rarely questions the overly simplistic tale of exploited workers in need of protection.

Written, shot, edited, and narrated by Jim Epstein.

October 16, 2018

QotD: I’m All Right Jack

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m All Right Jack is a film delicately poised between two very different cultural moments. The opening scene looks back to the war, the heyday of collective endeavour and national solidarity, but the song — both in content and style — seems to look forward to a new era of aggressive hedonism and unashamed self-interest.

At the time, though, what attracted most attention was Peter Sellers’s hilarious performance as the obstreperous trade unionist Fred Kite (“We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal”), which delighted many cinemagoers and won him a BAFTA. Not surprisingly, it went down very badly with union leaders and left-wing reviewers, but the Boultings were unrepentant. In an article for the Daily Express, they explained their reasoning:

    As individuals we believe in Britain because Britain has always stood for the individual.

    Nowadays there seem to be two sacred cows — Big Business and Organized Labour. Both are deep in a conspiracy against the individual — to force us to accept certain things for what in fact they are not. Both are busy feathering their nests most of the time. And to hell with the rest of us…

    AFter all, who is King in the Welfare State? That humourless, faceless monster — the official, the bureaucrat, the combine executive.

    Certainly a great deal has changed since we used to be Angry Men before the war … But at the end of this huge revolution we are not so sure that the losses have not been as great as the gains.

    For example, the tendency to think of people not as human beings but as part of a group, a bloc, a class.

The Boultings knew, of course, that this would annoy some poeple. But the great strength of the “average Briton”, they insisted, lay in “laughing at his leaders and institutions. We believe our films reflect the popular attitude and mood. Their success seems to prove our point.”

Since I’m All Right Jack is in black and white, it is easy to forget how bracingly modern it must have seemed, not just to the Queen and Harold Macmillan, but to the large audiences who flocked to see it in the autumn of 1959. It was released only ten years after Passport to Pimlico, but the difference in mood and tone can hardly be exaggerated. It is not just a question of colletivism versus individualism, but the social context that those two ideas reflected. The Ealing film was made against a background of austerity; the Boultings’ film is drenched in consumerism. In the early scenes of Passport to Pimlico, we find ourselves in a world of rationing and restrictions, bomb damage and dereliction. What kicks off the action, in fact, is the accidental detonation of an unexploded German bomb. But I’m All Right Jack is set in the late 1950s, a world awash with appliances and advertising, in which wartime austerity is merely a fading memory. The narrator tells us that at long last “industry, spurred by the march of science in all directions, was working at high pressure to supply those viatl needs for which the people had hungered for so long”. But when Ian Carmichael’s blundering hero gets a job in industrial management, he soon finds out what these “vital needs” are: Num-Yum chocolate bars and Detto washing powder, each with its own irritatingly catchy jingle.

Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of our National Imagination, 2015.

September 29, 2018

The Ontario government’s amazingly sensible approach to legal cannabis

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley expresses what a lot of surprised people must be feeling after Premier Doug Ford’s government introduced startlingly mature and sensible rules for the distribution and sale of cannabis products in the province after the federal government’s legalization is enacted:

The Ontario government tabled its cannabis retail framework in the legislature on Thursday, and it only further repudiates the Frightened Communist model envisioned by the Liberals. The government will sell pot online, as before, and will maintain a monopoly on wholesaling. But the rest will be up to the private sector, under the control of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission. As it stands, there won’t even be a cap on the number of licences; a government official said Thursday they expect 500 to 1,000 applications right off the bat.

In response, OPSEU president Smokey Thomas beamed out a furious press release on behalf of his spurned members — er, sorry, on behalf of Ontario’s “municipalities and communities.”

“Unlimited stores and unlimited places to smoke will cause unlimited problems,” Thomas averred. “It’s outrageous. We’re going to become the wild west of cannabis and Sheriff Doug Ford is going to skip town, leaving communities and municipalities holding the dime bag.”

Thomas predicted Premier Ford would hand out retail pot licences to “Conservative insiders” and “corporate donors.” (Corporate donations are illegal.) He accused Ford of funnelling what by rights should be public profits into “private pockets.”

“If Ontario’s finances are truly as bad as Ford wants us to believe, why is he giving away the millions, maybe even billions, in revenue we’d get if cannabis sales were public?” he asked.

Does the government make money on cigarettes? On alcohol sold in bars and restaurants, at privately run LCBO agency stores and, of late, in supermarkets? Of course it does. Scads of it.

So it’s all quite ridiculous, as OPSEU press releases tend to be. But Thomas is not wrong when he argues the new approach is remarkably permissive. Perhaps most notably, whereas the Liberals’ proposed rules banned using marijuana in public, the PCs’ would allow you to smoke or vape it anywhere you can tobacco (though not in cars or boats). But it’s far less permissive than one might expect in other ways as well.

June 28, 2018

US Supreme Court rules on the Janus case

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Eric Boehm reported soon after the decision was announced on Wednesday morning:

More than four decades after the Supreme Court ruled that public sector workers could be required to pay dues to unions even if they do not join one, a 5–4 majority on the high court overturned that precedent in a closely watched case that could have major ramifications for the future of public sector unions.

“Under Illinois law, public employees are forced to subsi­dize a union, even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bar­gaining and related activities,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmem­bers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”

In the short-term, the ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees means that plaintiff Mark Janus was successful in his decade-long fight to prevent the union from taking $50 out of his paycheck every two weeks. Over the years, Janus estimates, he’s contributed more than $6,000 to the union.

More broadly, Wednesday’s ruling could end the automatic deduction of union dues from millions of public employees’ paychecks, forcing unions like AFSCME to convince workers to voluntarily contribute dues — something workers would do, presumably, only if they have a reason to do so.

“So many of us have been forced to pay for political speech and policy positions with which we disagree, just so we can keep our jobs. This is a victory for all of us,” said Janus in a statement. “The right to say ‘no’ to a union is just as important as the right to say ‘yes.’ Finally our rights have been restored.”

The ruling is “a landmark victory for rights of public-sector employees,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which supported Janus’ lawsuit.

While today’s ruling certainly shifts the balance towards worker freedom, groups like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represented Janus, say they are already prepared for additional rounds of litigation. In states that previously have embraced right-to-work policies, unions have often tried to make it as difficult as possible for workers to renounce their membership.

At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw highlights a few of the key points:

Justice Alito wrote the decision and it followed along with the expectations of those who watched the case play out before the court. Also as expected, this was a 5-4 decision, split along partisan lines. At the heart of Janus was the question of whether or not unions can forcibly extract dues from workers’ paychecks without the worker proactively volunteering to contribute. In parallel to that, the court had to determine whether or not those extracted fees, being put toward lobbying efforts, constituted involuntary political speech on the part of the worker. The ruling answers both questions definitively.

You can read the full decision here [PDF] but I’ve extracted a couple of the key points from the syllabus. First is the issue of whether the previous ruling in Abood (which went in the unions’ favor) erred in allowing the forcible extraction of dues. Alito leaves no room for doubt.

    The State’s extraction of agency fees from nonconsenting public sector employees violates the First Amendment. Abood erred in concluding otherwise, and stare decisis cannot support it. Abood is therefore overruled.

The second question was the one about subsidizing the speech of others when it runs contrary to your personal beliefs. Again, Alito is definitive.

    Forcing free and independent individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable raises serious First Amendment concerns. E.g., West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 633. That includes compelling a person to subsidize the speech of other private speakers.

A union official, Paul Shearon, the IFPTE Secretary-Treasurer, put out an immediate statement saying that this was based on, “a bogus free speech argument.” He went on to say that the justices voting in the majority “are little better than political hacks.” That was followed up by a threat to take it to the streets.

    In the short run, the Janus decision may hurt some unions financially, but in the long run it will serve to make unions and their members more militant and force a stronger culture of internal organizing. The recent statewide teacher strikes demonstrate that when public sector workers face limitations on their bargaining rights they take their case to the streets.

This is going to send shockwaves through not just the unions, but the Democratic Party at large. The amount of money that the unions flush into Democratic coffers every year is likely more than most of you imagine.

Steven Malanga in City Journal provides some rough figures on how much money was at stake for the unions and their political activities:

With the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch, unions feared the outcome of the Janus case. After all, many union members have stated that they would give up their memberships if the court ruled that compulsory fees were illegal. An officer of the Communications Workers of America, which represents government employees in New Jersey, told an AFL-CIO convention last fall that only 54 percent of its 60,000 members said that they would remain in the union if they could opt out of paying fees. The California Teachers Association, meanwhile, crafted a 2019 budget that anticipated that as many as 23,000 members would leave if the court overturned the Illinois law. The union will also suffer from the loss of revenues from 28,000 nonmembers who’ve been paying agency fees, and will presumably stop doing so now that they’re no longer compelled. The union, according to a published report, estimated it could suffer a loss of some $20 million annually as a result.

Even before the ruling, government unions were reeling. Their membership has declined from a peak of 7.9 million in 2009 to 7.2 million today — a drop of nearly 9 percent. The portion of government workers in unions, which peaked in the mid-1990s at 38.7 percent, is now down to 34.4 percent, according to unionstats.com. Some of the decline is due to a significant reduction in the number of government workers after the 2008 financial crisis; even today, nine years into a recovery, the total number of government workers remains 10 percent lower than before the recession — a loss of 233,000 positions. But unions have suffered an even bigger falloff, because when government employment began trending back upward in 2014, union membership stayed flat. Many of the gains in government jobs since then have been in nonunion positions.

Unions have suffered big losses in Wisconsin, which banned compulsory unionization in the public sector in 2011. Some 140,000 union positions have dried up as workers chose not to retain their memberships. But other states that continued to compel workers to join a union or pay agency fees have also seen major losses, including New York, where union membership has fallen by 150,000, Illinois (down 88,000), Pennsylvania (down 54,000), and New Jersey (down 50,000). Those declines are reflected in union numbers, too. The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union, has lost nearly 250,000 members, or about 8 percent of its membership, since 2009. AFSCME’s national membership has shrunk by 200,000, or 13 percent.

April 9, 2018

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire – Horror in Manhattan – Extra History

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 7 Apr 2018

A throwaway cigarette landed on a pile of cloth. 146 workers died from the resulting fire. But this tragedy motivated citizens and politicians to take a stand from workers’ rights, creating a far safer world that we still live in over a century later.

January 28, 2018

The origins of the minimum wage

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Ontario, many businesses are still struggling to cope with the provincial government’s mandated rise in the minimum wage (the Tim Horton’s franchisees being the current Emmanuel Goldsteins as far as organized labour is concerned). In this essay for the Foundation for Economic Education, Pierre-Guy Veer points out that most franchise businesses have very low profit margins (2.4% for McDonalds franchises, for example) meaning that they can’t just pay the higher wages without a problem, and that the original intent of minimum wage legislation in the US was actually to drive down employment for certain ethnic and racial groups:

Normally, wages are determined at the intersection of supply (employees offering their services, the blue line) and demand (employers wanting workers, the orange line), the letter E. Since working in retail or restaurants requires little more than a high school diploma, that equilibrium is much lower than, say, a heart surgeon, who must endure years of training and study.

But when governments come and impose a minimum wage (the dark line), wages do increase… at the expense of workers. With a base wage now at E’, more workers want to work but fewer employers want to hire because of the increased cost. The newly formed triangle is made of surplus workers, i.e. unemployed workers who can’t find a job. This unlucky Brian meme summarizes the situation of what minimum wage is: wage eugenics.

And don’t think it’s a vice; creating unemployment was the explicit goal of imposing a minimum wage. It was a Machiavellian scheme imagined during the so-called Progressive Era (late 19th Century to about the 1920s), where it was thought that governments could better humanity by “weeding out” undesirables – in other words, eugenics.

In the U.S., this eugenic attitude was explicitly aimed at African Americans, whose (generally) lower productivity gave them lower wages. To “fight” this problem nationwide, the Hoover administration passed, in 1931, the Davis-Bacon Act in order to impose “prevailing wage” (usually unionized) on all federal contracts. It was a thinly veiled attempt to “weed out” non-unionized workers, who were either African American or immigrant, in order to protect unionized, white jobs. Supporters of the bill, like Representative Clayton Algood, were very explicit in their racist intents:

    That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.

But while the racist intent of the minimum wage has disappeared, its effect is always very real. It greatly affects the people it wants to help, i.e. low-skilled workers, and leaves them with fewer options. So don’t be fooled by unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Youth participation rates (ages 16-19) are still hovering around all-time lows (affected, among others, by minimum wage laws); this means that fewer of them are looking for jobs, decreasing unemployment figures.

It gets worse when breaking down races; only 28.8 percent of African American youth were working or looking for a job, compared to 31.6 for Hispanics and 36.7 percent for whites in December 2017.

November 2, 2017

QotD: Free trade versus modern “Free Trade” agreements

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Once upon a time, free-trade agreements were about just that: free trade. You abolish your tariffs and import restrictions, I’ll abolish mine. Trade increases, countries specialize in what they’re best equipped to do, efficiency increases, price levels drop, everybody wins.

Then environmentalists began honking about exporting pollution and demanded what amounted to imposing First World regulation on Third World countries who – in general – wanted the jobs and the economic stimulus from trade more than they wanted to make environmentalists happy. But the priorities of poor brown people didn’t matter to rich white environmentalists who already had theirs, and the environmentalists had political clout in the First World, so they won. Free-trade agreements started to include “environmental safeguards”.

Next, the labor unions, frightened because foreign workers might compete down domestic wages, began honking about abusive Third World labor conditions about which they didn’t really give a damn. They won, and “free trade” agreements began to include yet more impositions of First World pet causes on Third World countries. The precedent firmed up: free trade agreements were no longer to be about “free” trade, but rather about managing trade in the interests of wealthy First Worlders.

Eric S. Raymond, “TPP and the Law of Unintended Consequences”, Armed and Dangerous, 2016-04-12.

October 10, 2017

This is not what unions are supposed to do – getting bad cops back on the job

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed Krayewski explains why it’s so tough to fire a police officer who is proven to be dangerous to the public:

Since 2008, the Philadelphia Police Department has fired more than 150 cops, of whom at least 88 had been arrested and at least 48 were eventually convicted on charges like murder, rape, and extortion. Seventy-one of those officers tried to get their jobs back, and of those 71, at least 44 were successful.

In reviewing 37 of the nation’s largest police departments, including Philadelphia, the Post found that since 2006 at least 451 of about 1,800 fired officers got their jobs back, thanks to provisions in their union contracts. Campaign Zero, an effort of a group of Black Lives Matter activists, tracks union contracts and their content; it finds that such arrangements are guaranteed in some way in virtually each contract they reviewed. That ubiquity makes many efforts at reducing police violence futile. Cities must have the ability to fire cops who are unable to do their jobs without resorting to excessive force.

[…]

Public employees have a right to associate and assemble, of course. But public unions have the power they enjoy today only because of expansive privileges granted to them by government. Labor unions in the private sector must be careful not to make demands that would make their employers fiscally unsustainable. With public-sector unions, by contrast, the government will always be there for a bailout. And no matter how much a service declines in the public sector, the “customers” often have no other place to go. There is no competitive pressure for institutions like police to be responsive to consumer demands. Single-party rule in most major cities offers additional inoculatation from facing consequences for subpar performance.

Bad cops will keep getting rehired as long as public sector unions are among the most powerful forces in government, setting rules that protect public employees at the expense of the people they’re supposed to serve.

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