Licensing laws tend to have particularly harsh consequences on members of minority groups for a couple reasons. First, if a law requires a person to have, say, a college degree to practice the trade of interior design (which is the law in Florida), people who have less money and time to spend in college will find that avenue of opportunity closed to them. Since black and Hispanic Floridians are about 30 percent less likely to have a college degree, they will suffer more from this absurd licensing requirement than others will. Competitor’s Veto laws that forbid a person from practicing a trade unless they get permission from the businesses already operating in that industry are also very likely to create a sort of Old Boys Network, and to exclude entrepreneurs who lack political connections. Second, in a more general sense, any law that restricts economic opportunity for some to benefit others—as licensing laws tend to do—are likely to benefit those who have more political influence and can therefore get the government to regulate in ways favorable to them. Since members of minority groups have less political influence, they tend to be the ones excluded.
|
|||||
|
Reason goes to sleep during election campaigns. Sometimes it is said elections are like the fiesta of democracy, which is true, but electoral campaigns are like bachelor parties which culminate in huge hangovers and sometimes culminate in disasters. October 15th, 2015 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Dear NHS worshippers, sorry to be a killjoy, but look, the NHS is not ‘yours’, and never has been. You have no control over it. You feel like you are in control when you spin your little toy wheel, but try steering the car in any direction other than the one where it is already heading, and see what happens. The ones who really drive the car are the political class and the medical establishment. ‘Democratic accountability’ is a mirage. All it really means is that healthcare managers answer to bureaucrats, who answer to other bureaucrats, who also answer to other bureaucrats, who, after some more detours, answer to some politician. That’s democratic accountability. Feel powerful now? Accountability through the political system is about the weakest form of accountability one could imagine, and in healthcare it is even weaker than in other areas. – Kristian Niemietz, who stonks the NHS in an article from 2014 called The Maggie Simpson delusion: the NHS is not ‘ours’ October 13th, 2015 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Finally, contemporary feminists do not believe that women are independent, free-thinking individuals. Feminists promote a cliquey, sisterhood mentality, but not through a collective and positive sharing of ideas. They’re the kind of group you’d encounter at school who would shun you if you weren’t wearing the right kind of hairband. Today’s feminism is opposed to criticism and nuance, refusing to allow women to form their own opinions or challenge preconceived ideas. And feminists call for the state to intervene when they want an opposing view silenced, and launch Twitter wars against dissenting views. October 12th, 2015 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
For the benefit of my foreign readers, I should make clear that despite the protestations of the current dork masquerading as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church of England is not the national religion, it is the NHS! The people of Britain (dread words!) kneel and pray to it in adoration despite it being the biggest Ponzi scheme ever invented – well, it was but those ‘damn Yankees’ have out-done us again with their ludicrous ‘Obamacare’ nonsense. But perhaps the financial tectonic plates just shifted and finally reality will bring the temple crashing down. October 11th, 2015 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
The point of free markets is to allow free action in the economic sphere so that people (individually and working together) can achieve their objectives. For some this might be more family life and less work; for others an interest in eating organic produce; some people might want to work for a co-operative (even if their productivity and wages were lower); and so on. All sorts of people – not just women – make choices that reduce their measured productivity, hours worked and wages and so do not maximise measured economic growth.I work for a charity and not a hedge fund; my wife teaches French and decided not to be a lawyer. My wife works shorter hours than me. We both work shorter hours than the Chief Executive of Goldman Sachs. Would Nicky Morgan have a problem with this? In a free society, labour market outcomes are a product of preferences. Women may well prefer to work more flexible hours, shorter hours, closer to home, in jobs that fit in better with child care, and so on. Some women may wish to give up work altogether for a period of time (perhaps for life). Others might not. But, if women choose to combine family-friendly work with family life, this does not damage the economy or reduce productivity. It is the outcome of people’s own preferences: and, acting in accordance with their preferences, people maximise their welfare. These decisions are often taken despite the fact that the state heavily weights the dice against women choosing to work at home, both by the shape of the tax and benefits system and the existence of state-subsidised childcare. – Phil Booth, knocking it for six at the IEA October 10th, 2015 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
If Russia’s defense ministry really does believe that all the missiles found their intended targets, those sheep must have been up to something October 9th, 2015 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
What would cutting Canada’s emissions in half really look like? Which schoolbuses and fire trucks would Mulcair say we shouldn’t use any more? Which farms will be shut down? Which factories? (Has Mulcair he told his union friends about that last part?) Mulcair’s plan will cripple our country without changing the world’s temperature one degree. Because as the UN IPCC itself admits, even if every country in the world obeyed the Kyoto Protocol, including China, it would not change the temperature of the world by 1/100th of one degree, even after 100 years. These cap and trade schemes are really about deindustrializing the West, and crippling capitalism and progress. October 7th, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Not only is the capitalist system not responsible for the latest economic crisis, but all attempts to severely hamstring or regulate the market economy out of existence only succeeds in undermining the greatest engine of economic progress and prosperity known to mankind. October 4th, 2015 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 2nd, 2015 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Class War claims to represent a local community that is sick of rising house prices and an influx of wealth from overseas. However, Cereal Killer employs people from the local community, and many more residents come to the café to socialise and bond over a bowl or two of Coco Pops. The café remains defiant in the face of bullying and intimidation, and locals have since rallied behind it, with other businesses dropping off care packages for the owners. Moncrieff told me that footfall has actually increased since the attack. The Fuck Parade was made up of a small core of balaclava-wearing pillocks and a lot of posers. People who rail against gentrification are, thankfully, the minority, and they have no right to speak for residents who are probably too busy enjoying new amenities and job prospects to protest. Gentrification is not part of some conspiracy against the poor. Opportunities for people in Shoreditch to improve their lives are growing, and that is no bad thing. Fortunately, a bunch of idiots throwing cornflakes at a shopfront won’t change that. October 1st, 2015 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
The UN report is not “well-meaning.” It’s an effort to use the hysteria of privileged Western women to slip through global censorship in service of autocrats and oligarchs at home and abroad. The people pushing it are not good people who are going too far. They’re awful, horrible people exploiting useful idiots. September 30th, 2015 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||