Mike Munger has no patience with Kamala Harris’s flirtation with price controls.
While national Democrats kowtow to teachers’ union bosses, the party faithful face a painful reality. They see that the overwhelming majority of public-school students—their own children, in many cases—are struggling to learn and falling behind, a crisis that has intensified coming out of the pandemic. They also see that a growing number of other states are empowering families to find better schools for their kids. Democratic leaders should worry that their voters will ask them why those states are different. The honest answer is that these places are rejecting a unions-first, students-last platform.
David Henderson offers important reflections on Labor Day.
Given the 12.5% of Americans who got their start at McDonald’s, that suggests a staggering lack of appreciation for this company’s extraordinary reach. And that reach extends well beyond Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff. Onetime McDonald’s burger flippers include Republican former House Speaker Paul Ryan, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, George W. Bush chief of staff Andrew Card, actress Sharon Stone and “Hamilton” creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda. McDonald’s rightly brags about the benefits it offers employees, such as a tuition-assistance plan that can help them earn a high-school diploma, finish college or even learn English.
Still, the most important contribution by McDonald’s is the business itself. It brings jobs to communities, supports the other businesses it buys and sells from, not to mention offers parents of modest means a way to treat the family to a fun meal out.
Those who look down on fast-food work miss the point. The real skills McDonald’s imparts aren’t how to cook a Big Mac or operate the cash register. It’s an education in the work culture: teaching employees courtesy toward customers, attentiveness to what your boss needs, cleanliness, cooperation with co-workers—and the satisfaction of an earned paycheck.
[DBx: Hikes in the minimum wage would shrink young people’s opportunities to take advantage of these benefits of working for companies such as McDonald’s.]
Judge Glock lays out “a new supply-side agenda.” A slice:
As the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University shows, the burden of regulation has gotten heavier by various measures. The number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations has gone from 100,000 in the early 1980s to more than 180,000 today. The budget of regulatory agencies has swelled from under $20 billion to about $70 billion, while staffing at such agencies has doubled, to almost 300,000, from its deregulation-era nadir. Estimates of the annual cost of regulations, just at the federal level, keep rising, ranging as high as $3 trillion annually. Meantime, lawsuits and other federal efforts have pushed companies to focus more on “equity” and on ending “discrimination,” as opposed to production.
Trump is not guided by ideology or a detailed understanding of policy—but he seems to grasp that the union-skeptical venture capitalists represent the better path forward. And where he goes, the Republican Party follows.
Arnold Kling recommends the “group-status lens.”
My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein talks with Adam Dixon about Adam Smith and hate.
