My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott makes the case against using antitrust to regulate AI.
Mr. Newsom has accused us of “blatantly lying” by highlighting last weekend how fast-food restaurants in his state have been cutting jobs and reducing hours since the $20 minimum took effect in April. “Month after month, fast food jobs have INCREASED since we raised the minimum wage to $20/hour for the industry,” he wrote on X.com.
The Governor cited a news story in the Orange County Register that reported an uptick in jobs at Southern California limited service restaurants—many but not all of which are fast-food chains covered by the law—since March. But as we previously noted, this data isn’t adjusted for seasonal effects, and restaurants typically hire more workers in the spring and summer.
After accounting for seasonal effects, California’s limited-service restaurants have shed 3,333 jobs since March and 6,320 since January, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Limited-service restaurants in Nevada have added 1,757 jobs since March. Credit to the Employment Policies Institute for digging up the seasonal data.
Mr. Newsom tweeted that “What’s good for workers is good for California!” Certainly. But California’s $20 minimum is bad for workers and the state. It is especially harmful to teens who may be priced out of jobs and miss valuable work experience. It also disproportionately harms Hispanics who make up 60% of the state’s fast-food workers.
Francis Fukuyama reflects on J.D. Vance’s apparent notion of what it means to be American. (HT David Levey) Here’s his conclusion:
The important point, though, is that any attempt to build a national identity that goes beyond the American creed must be one, like baseball or Thanksgiving, that can be shared equally by all Americans. The “one” that we are building out of the “many” in E pluribus unum must be accessible to the de facto diversity of contemporary America. Anyone who has attended a naturalization ceremony can attest to how moving they are, and how seriously they are regarded. Once the naturalization oath is taken, a person born in Iran or Korea or Guatemala can proudly assert, as my grandfather once did, that they are genuine Americans. Acceptance into the American family should not depend on how many generations of ancestors you have buried in American soil, but on what you as an individual choose and believe.
Barton Swaim writes with insight about Trump – and Harris. A slice:
This leads me back to a basic and, I’m sure, not entirely original observation. Mr. Trump’s popularity among lower- and middle-income Americans is largely the product of progressive insanity. Mr. Trump briefly ran for president in 2000 to no effect and hinted in 2011 that he would run, also to no effect. Only in 2016, when modern liberalism had blossomed into a coterie of what we now call “woke” ideologies—the obsession with racial and sexual identity, the hatred of America and the West, the loathing of law enforcement—did Mr. Trump’s candidacy electrify the country’s wage earners and shopkeepers.
Mr. Trump’s fandom is a measure of middle- and working-class exasperation with the delusions and perversities of an illiberal progressive elite. That is why his poll numbers go up, as he loves to remind audiences, every time prosecutors indict him. For his fans, and for many right-leaning people who wish he’d be “nicer” and who regret the stridency of politics in the 21st century, the indictments validate Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
If his popularity is, as I think, a product of the Democrats’ leftward lurch, Republicans can take solace in Ms. Harris’s likely ascension. The Democrats have traded an intellectually weakened liberal who acquiesced to everything progressives wanted for a full-on progressive who can be counted on to promote everything progressives want: Medicare for all, free healthcare for illegal immigrants, the abolition of cash bail, and much more.
Here’s part 2 of Chelsea Follett’s series, at EconLog, on global inequality. A slice:
Well-being is multifaceted. Attempts to measure it should include income but should also recognize the complexity of the topic and avoid focusing myopically on income.
George Mason University economist Vincent Geloso and I tried to do just that by creating a new measure of inequality, the Inequality of Human Progress Index (IHPI). The IHPI assesses well-being holistically by seeking to capture a fuller range of choices available to individuals than can be gleaned from income alone. By examining inequality in a multidimensional way, the IHPI takes inequality more seriously than measures that focus solely on income inequality. In fact, we surveyed international inequality across a greater number of dimensions than any prior index.
Kyle Smith reports happy news: ‘Woke’ is no longer selling at the box office. A slice:
This month’s hit movie “Twisters” is full of wonders: pickup trucks take flight, an entire town gets put through nature’s blender. Perhaps most astonishing, however, is what isn’t in it: any mention of climate change.
That wasn’t happenstance. The film’s director, Lee Isaac Chung, said the omission was deliberate. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented,” he told CNN.
Five years ago “Twisters” probably would have not only mentioned climate change but also included a speech or three about it and made a villain out of someone in the fossil-fuel business, like a nefarious fracker. The villain in today’s film is an opportunistic property developer. If anything, the story suggests it’s factors meant to combat climate change that pose unheralded dangers: The characters are nearly killed by the blades of a gigantic wind turbine that is ripped apart in a storm.
