On Tuesday evening, the House of Representatives passed the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA) in a 230–193 vote, with 20 Republicans crossing party lines to vote in support of the Democratic-led legislation. The bill, which aims to speed up first contract talks after workers unionize, now moves to the Senate.
The bill has been celebrated by a growing consortium of populists that has taken over the Republican Party.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who has sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said he was “glad to see the House has done the right thing for working-class Americans.” He added, “We need real labor reform that puts workers first.” Rep. Pete Stauber (R–Minn.), who cosponsored the bill in the House, said he was “proud to partner” on the bill to “hold employers accountable and ensure workers have a real voice at the negotiating table,” adding that “when our workers succeed, our entire nation succeeds.” The bill has also been heralded by Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, who described it as the “best opportunity yet for conservatives to show they support strong labor laws and the rights of workers.”
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The FLCA would mandate a federally supervised arbitration panel to impose contract terms on the entire workplace, meaning that many workers would lose the ability to negotiate for themselves. Their wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions could be settled by union officials they did not support, and government bureaucrats they did not vote for.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R–Mich.) made this very point on the House floor. He argued the bill actually “erodes workers’ rights” and that a “government-appointed arbitration panel” would impose a contract if the parties do not reach an agreement within the bill’s timeline.
“Supporters of this bill assure businesses and workers that it is about worker empowerment and efficiency,” Walberg said. “I may be misremembering the definition of empowerment, but I can guarantee it does not mean taking away a worker’s right to vote on his or her own contract and giving that power to a Washington bureaucrat with no stake in the outcome.
The Editorial Board of the Washington Post reports on Donald Trump’s new love: inflation. A slice:
Fiscal policy isn’t helping. So long as Congress runs a deficit of $1.8 trillion a year, the economy will stay overheated, pushing prices higher. Reports from the Treasury Department this week confirmed that the federal government has already borrowed $1.2 trillion in the first eight months of this fiscal year and is projected to borrow at least $2 trillion by the end of September.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy shouldn’t begin with the presumption that an emerging technology requires new forms of government control. In fact, the history of American technology policy shows that a light-touch approach allows consumers and innovators to find the best uses for technology. The light-touch approach enables companies to respond to the problems and demands of their consumers rather than those of the government, helping American companies become industry leaders.
Yet concerningly, a new bad policy idea intended to support American leadership in AI is emerging on both the Left and the Right. President Trump has floated a possible federal “partnership” with major AI companies, in which the public could receive “pieces” of those companies and benefit from their success. The details are unclear, but all signs point to the administration seeking to acquire equity stakes, which it has done with over 20 companies starting last year.
On the Left, Senator Bernie Sanders has been more explicit. His proposed American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would impose a one-time 50 percent tax on the largest AI companies, paid in stock. The government would then use voting shares and board representation to block decisions it deemed harmful and push decisions it deemed beneficial.
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If the government also becomes a shareholder, it would have financial and political incentives tied to the success of some firms over others, possibly making it harder for smaller or newer companies to challenge government-backed incumbents and weakening the market’s competitiveness.
A regulator may hesitate to enforce rules that could reduce a government-backed company’s valuation. A procurement office may favor a company in which the government has a direct interest. Or a president may pressure companies to serve political goals while presenting that pressure as stewardship of the public’s investment.
Want to know why the price of water is rising? GMU Econ alum Julia Cartwright has some answers.
Julian Simon would have loved – although not been surprised by – this development.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan debates Simon Hankinson on ICE deportations.
Brad Thompson remembers his dissertation director, Gordon Wood.
Also remembering Gordon Wood is the historian Alan Guelzo. A slice:
Wood’s trademarks were his strict attention to written sources, and his relative indifference to social, cultural, and ethnic history. But he balanced that indifference by his exquisite attention to the most minute changes in voice by pamphleteers and newspapers, even in the use of political vocabulary. When Creation was published in 1969, Wood was considered avant-garde because his revolutionaries seemed to pay no attention to the restrained and lofty political models of Greece and Rome. But he would remain just as resistant to the import of more recent ideological fashions into history writing, and especially the attempt to convert historical process into broad binary categories of oppressed/oppressor or settler/indigenous. In 2019, he broke with a large community of historians when he expressed his skepticism toward the 1619 Project’s proposal that slavery was the dominant fact of American life and that the Revolution was a device for protecting it. In Wood’s eyes, this was absurd. The 1619 Project might be pardoned as an example of over-wrought journalism, but it should not be mistaken for sober-sided history-writing, and it was important for the life a nation for historians to say so. “We all want justice,” he wrote, “but not at the expense of truth.”
