Progressives place a bunch of constraints of the lives of the working poor, then they expect to be hoisted triumphantly into office on the shoulders of people they have harmed. When a worker making $800 on 50 hours of work has to go home and tell her family she is now making $600 on 40 hours of work because new federal rules on overtime pay make the 50 hour arrangement uneconomical, she doesn’t need to understand the theoretical subtleties of economics to understand what’s happened. Bernstein and the president’s other supporters believe workers will be pleased about this constraint. They seem to think that someone making $15/hour for 50 hours of work will now have the same schedule, but with an extra $75 for the week. Or, alternatively, that they will be reduced to 40 hours and $600, and be happy about it, because they were only coerced into those extra hours by their employers. And, this has the added bonus of creating more jobs, to replace the lost hours.
Sarah Skwire explains how capitalism eases women’s work as it simultaneously keeps us clean.
Jim Powell and Larry Reed write about Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand.
Reason’s Ron Bailey explores the latest minimum-wage follies.
Here’s Ed Krayewski’s take on the Panama Papers.
My colleague Chris Coyne and GMU Econ alum Abby Hall Blanco wisely warn us of freedom’s fragility.
Many congratulations to Stanford University’s John Taylor for receiving APEE’s 2016 Adam Smith Award.
