Home // 2015 // July

Hey Overpriced Minimum Wage Workers, Your Robot Replacement Has Already Been Hired

I have seen the future, and it’s a tablet computer that does not want to be paid $15 an hour.

Los Angeles is the latest municipality where politicians are considering buying votes by mandating a $15 per hour minimum wage. That’s actually a ban on workers taking jobs for $12 or $14 per hour, but it sounds compassionate when reduced to slogans and finger-wagging at “greedy”businesses. New York is poised to implement $15 per hour as the minimum wage for fast food workers state-wide. And Vice President Joe Biden is among the pols calling for a federal minimum wage hike–to $12 per hour, in his case (not that he himself is worth that much).

But you know what? Businesses are way ahead of them.

I took my son to Chili’s for lunch today. On the table was one of the 45,000 Ziosk tablets (it may be more by now) the company had in place over a year ago. The widgets let you order drinks and desserts and pay your bill without flagging down a server. They also offer some entertainment options. Chili’s swears up and down that no server jobs are at risk because “we’d never want to lose our awesome Team Members,” But I bet Chili’s doesn’t want to lose money, either, and it would risk that if labor costs go through the roof. The device is obviously one software upgrade away from letting customers order everything electronically, which could potentially reduce server needs to one or two backups for the old-school customers who don’t want to use a touchscreen.

So…What do you think is going to happen if the move for a massively boosted minimum wage goes nationwide?

I'm guessing that tipping the terminal will not be a thing.

I’m guessing that tipping the terminal will not be a thing.

Unshockingly, a report released today says that lots of jobs are on the chopping block if the government tries to create prosperity out of thin air by hiking the minimum wage. The report, by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, and Ben Gitis, director of labor-market policy at the American Action Forum, says that “increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2020 would affect 55.1 million workers and cost 6.6 million jobs.”

A lower hike would be “better” in the sense of doing less damage. Boosting the minimum to $12 per hour “would cost 3.8 million low-wage jobs.” Which sucks less. Under either scenario, only a tiny percentage of gains would be enjoyed by those in poverty–at the expense of jobs and paychecks.

Business owners are neither stupid nor suicidal. They listen to the political rhetoric coming out of demagogues’ mouths and they make contingency plans for surviving the policy flingings of the simians we elect to office. Those Ziosks on the table aren’t just gee-whiz toys;they’re hedges against the future.

In San Francisco, where the $15 minimum wage is already law, innovative startup Momentum Machines has a plan to completely mechanize fast-food restaurants from the kitchen to the table. The company notes, “An average quick service restaurant spends $135K every year on labor for the production of hamburgers. Not only does our machine eliminate nearly all of that cost, it also obviates the associated management headaches.”

But the headaches for unskilled workers trying to get a foothold in the job market are just beginning.

IRS Prone to Target Non-Profits Unfairly, Says Government Agency

The headline above should be news to exactly nobody, Well…Except for the president of the United States. He went on John Stewart on Tuesday to insist that no way, no how, did the Internal Revenue Service deliberately target conservative organizations. The Washington Times summarizes it thusly:

Mr. Obama said Congress “passed a crummy law” that provided vague guidance to the people who worked at the IRS. And he said that employees implemented the law “poorly and stupidly.”

The president went on to say that the “real scandal around the IRS is that they have been so poorly funded that they cannot go after these folks who are deliberately avoiding tax payments.”

Note that John Stewart, towards the end of the chat, called for mandatory national service for Americans. So this episode is a must-watch of epic fail.

But Obama’s comments come after the IRS’s own inspector general admitted that the tax agency targeted Tea Party groups “based on names and policy positions instead of indications of political campaign intervention.”

And, as if to emphasize the point, the day after Obama smarmed away concerns about the use of the IRS as a political weapon, the Government Accountability Office issued its own report, warning “The control deficiencies GAO found increase the risk that EO could select organizations for examination in an unfair manner—for example, based on an organization’s religious, educational, political, or other views.”

But it’s all on Congress and a “crummy law,” of course.

Discourage Vice and Reap Bonanzas With High Taxes! What Could Go Wrong?

Oh. And sex. They'll have to think of a way to tax sex.

Photo by defekto / Foter / CC BY-NC

What could make more sense than discouraging weak-minded sinners from the path of wrongfulness (or whatever the fuck the word is) by loading high tariffs on smokes, booze, sodas or whatever might rub today’s bien pensant crew the wrong way while they’re tut-tutting over the failures of lesser creatures? Why, it’s a no-brainer! And you could close government budgetary gaps with the moolah pouring in from the proceeds of those high taxes, too.

Forget that there’s a bit of a disconnect between simultaneously using taxes as proxies for prohibition and revenue raising. Well…No. Don’t forget that. And don’t forget that people have always been a tad resistant to actual prohibition efforts,and the historical record shows similar pitfalls for sin taxes.

Anyway, that’s the gist of my new piece for Reason. Pour a tall glass and light a smoke while you read “It’s Time We Learned from Sin Taxes’ Impressive History of Failure.”

Is Bitcoin the Key to Evading Capital Controls?

My first post-staff weekly column is up at Reason.com, and it’s about the potential cryptocurrencies show for dodging capital controls and evading the worst effects of intrusive monetary policy. Some news reports suggest that it’s already happening in Greece, and on a small scale it probably is. But I suspect those headlines resulted from financial journalists looking at the situation and figuring out how they would hedge risk and get money past the authorities. More people are likely to see and have access to those solutions in the future.

To read the full article, click “Bitcoin May Be Too Late for Greece, But Not Other Countries Headed In That Direction.”

Compassion Means Stealing Shit From People Who, Unlike You, Thought Ahead

You are welcome in the community if you have the secret Christian decoder ringYesterday, a Facebook “friend” (in the broad social media sense of the term) posted a brief musing about the current flurry of apocalyptic fiction.

If the apocalypse-books industry was a little less “arm yourself to the teeth so your family is the only one in town that doesn’t starve in our far-fetched psuedoscientific global economic collapse” and a little more “use battle-tested American Red Cross first aid and community response training to save as many people as possible during a plausible natural disaster scenario,” I’d have a lot more respect for it. I mean, I’m not going to be the guy who shoots some stranger’s kid over a can of string beans, and people who write books where they fantasize about that sort of thing scare me more than the idea of an actual apocalypse does.

Now, personally, I understand wishing writers catered more to my tastes. If the romance novel genre had more sex scenes and less heartwrenching relationship contrivance, I’d “have a lot more respect for it” too. In the morning, I mean. But romance novelists have hit on a formula that works, and they don’t need my respect. The same goes for apocalyptic fiction and my Facebook acquaintance’s complaints.

I’m also not entirely sure what this guy is talking about. I’ve read a few shit-hits-the-fan novels, and they boil down to ant-and-grasshopper morality tales, though the ant usually (unlike in the original fable) rises to the occasion to help out neighbors and rebuild a community. There are lots of books and lots of takes, of course, and maybe Facebook guy has a specific dude-in-his-bunker book in mind. But the granddaddy of the current apocalyptic fiction flurry is probably Patriots by James Wesley, Rawles (no, the comma isn’t an accident). Patriots, once you get past the use of “are you a Christian?” as the gag-inducing secret handshake of the economic collapse, focuses on people who planned ahead to survive the worst and reconnect with others.

Anyway, that’s an aside, the real point is that the first comment on this musing was:

If an apocalypse ever happens, I’m going to make it my sole mission in life to gather together an enormous mob of people to take out all the survivalists, and then use all of their stockpiles to build a socialist utopia.

And then Facebook guy answers, “I like the way you think!”

One utopia, coming up!

Photo by the U.S. Government

Why do I care? Because Facebook guy is a civil liberties columnist and advocate. In fact, he inherited a civil libertarian gig I had years ago, though he writes from more of a progressive/SJW perspective. He’s also very active as a political lefty in his community (the one that preppers apparently plan to barricade the doors against). This progressive “civil libertarian” perspective apparently includes the idea that if people have more foresight than you and put aside some provisions for hard times, it’s OK to gang together with other dumbasses who didn’t stick some canned soup in the pantry, kill the prepared types (I’m interpreting “take out” by its usual usage), steal their shit, and use the stuff to impose your preferred political and economic system on the survivors. This is a whole step beyond just wishing the SHTF fiction genre was nothing more than a series of boring tracts about the Red Cross’s good deeds. I’d have to turn my bitching about romance novels into a rape fantasy to achieve the equivalent, and I’m not a sufficiently shitty human being to do that.

To give this guy his due, he does advocate for civil liberties in an effective way on a lot of issues. He’s generally very good on police abuse, search and seizure, and free speech. But it’s interesting how overtly thuggish a professional civil liberties advocate can be in an unguarded moment–to the point of high-fiving the idea of mass violence and totalitarian impositions against those who rub him the wrong way.

Is there a take-away here?

Yeah. Be very cautious of those who set themselves up as guardians of your liberty. You never know when their personal preferences in some other area will overcome their regard for your freedom.

Oh, and I know Fifty Shades of Grey has sex scenes. I just can’t… No thanks.

The U.S. Government Makes Me Gag

The beating heart of worries about free speech and the danger of overreaching government enjoyed a shock from the old defibrillator on June 8. That’s when attorney Ken White of prominent legal blog Popehat.com revealed that libertarian online publication Reason.com, where I was managing editor until June 30 (I left for unrelated family reasons) had received a grand jury subpoena dated Jun 2, demanding that the publication turn over identifying information about six of its readers. Even as that conversation got a jolt, though, few people knew just how desperate the federal government was to slap legal duct tape over the mouths of those who would criticize its officials and policies.

So...You're saying I overdid it?

Judge Katherine Forrest. Photo by U.S. Government

As Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch revealed, the readers targeted by the subpoena commented under pseudonyms on an article about the sentencing of Ross Ulbricht, the convicted entrepreneur behind the Silk Road online marketplace for illicit recreational drugs. Reacting to the brutal life sentence for Ulbricht, readers skeptical of drug prohibition left understandably enraged comments about Judge Katherine Forrest. They wished her to hell, suggested she ought to be shot, or recommended she be fed through a wood chipper. Not nice stuff. But then, taking away a man’s life because he engaged in victimless acts that you don’t like isn’t so sweet-tempered either.

Apparently angered by the darts tossed at Judge Forrest, Preet Bharara, United States Attorney for the Southern District, and his sidekick Assistant U.S. Attorney Niketh Velamoor, targeted the commenters for the attention of the modern bureaucratic inquisition. Speak out against the state, will you? Let’s have a scary and expensive look into your lives. The subpoena demanded “subscriber/account information,” “address(es), email address(es), telephone number(s),” “IP address(es,” “credit card/bank information”…

This "free speech" thing... I do not get it

Preet Bharara. Photo by U.S. Government

Dissecting the subpoena and the targeted comments, Popehat’s White noted that “true threats” to do violence to people are not protected by law, but that the angry ventings at Reason “are very clearly not true threats—that this is not even a close call.” That is to say, there was no legitimate reason to target the commenters, and no hope of prosecuting them. The intrusive investigation itself, with its related fears, inconveniences, and costs, was also the penalty.

Slowly at first, but gathering speed, law bloggers, political pundits, and news outlets picked up the story. Most agreed with White that Bharara and company were not just exceeding their authority, but threatening legitimate criticism of government officials. “Even if the subpoenas don’t result in the filing of any charges, they can still impose substantial costs on their targets, and create a chilling effect on political speech,” cautioned Ilya Somin at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog. The New York Post editorialized that Bharara’s subpoena “seems a dangerous case of overreaction”—and perhaps one intended to stroke a judge before whom he regularly appeared.

Bharara has a notably tense relationship with the judiciary that he may wish to paper over. A federal judge recently told him to watch his mouth and stop publicly declaring the targets of his investigations to be guilty before they’ve gone to trial.

Can't a guy help a friend...hurt an enemy?

Judge Frank Maas. Photo by U.S. Government

Absent from the discussion, though, was Reason itself. Its staff was unavailable to correct misstatements about the face off with the Justice Department, absent in the defense of valued readers, and didn’t even protest a general screwing by the government. This was all inconceivable for a publication that had never before been shy about flaying politicians, judges, and prosecutors. But there was a very nasty cause for the silence. Unbeknownst to the public, Reason and its staff had been threatened with fines and imprisonment if they said a word about the subpoena, or even revealed that they’d been ordered to stay silent. The publication had been censored through the issuance of a gag order, requested by loose-lips Bharara’s office and signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas, hours after Ken White got hold of the subpoena.

Americans think of their country as one that embraces free speech. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” John Milton wrote in Areopagitica (1644). That celebration of open discussion came to permeate western civilization and invigorates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Calling officials sons, daughters, or trans-puppies of bitches is a national pastime.

But that tradition of free speech has been violated overtly or quietly throughout the nation’s history. The Sedition Acts, Civil War-era censorship, and the Red Scares all represented government attacks on dissenting voices. American history is perhaps notable less for total absence of limits on speech than for belated revulsion at such attempts at muzzling. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and Senator Joseph McCarthy are now recognized by anybody worth a damn as national embarrassments.

Modern gag orders, such as the one imposed on Reason, fall well within the infamous tradition of contemptible policies that violate the free speech tradition and can be expected to eventually earn public repudiation. Bharara, Velamoor, Maas, Forrest, and company are due to join the ranks of figures whose roles in public life might well be more than a bit tarnished by their actions (and should really be limited to curbside recycling. In Pyongyang).

Legal eagles would have it that some gag orders are necessary to ensure fair trials or allow for effective investigation of ongoing crime. For arguments sake, let’s grant them the point. But the muzzling of Reason was imposed after Reason had (legally) forwarded the subpoena to commenters, after Ken White had obtained the document, and continued in place after the matter had become a topic for international discussion. When interested parties from New York to London to Moscow were sounding off on Preet Bharara’s inquisition, only Reason writers were forbidden to chime in—or to reveal why they were silent.

Gag orders are understandably controversial even among government employees garbed in black dresses. Just last year, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola of Washington, D.C. slapped down the feds in a very similar case involving gag orders intended to conceal the existence of subpoenas targeting Twitter and Yahoo users. He objected that an order “would implicate Twitter’s rights under the First Amendment because it would be both a content-based restriction of speech and a prior restraint on speech.” Facciola allowed that the existence of the subpoenas and objections to them should be made public in redacted form so that debate could continue without jeopardizing the investigation.

And again, the gag order on Reason remained in place after the full content of the subpoena in question was already a matter of public discussion. A fair conclusion is that it was intended not to protect legal process, but to restrain Reason’s political speech, both to mold debate and to punish the publication for its dissent. Reason, it seems, was muzzled purely as an exercise in government thuggery.

That the subpoena and subsequent gag order were purely abuses of power is hardly a stretch of the imagination. Bharara, Velamoor, Maas, and Katherine Forrest are all political creatures. Obama-appointee Forrest, to her credit, once ruled against arbitrary detention powers under the National Defense Authorization Act (though her injunction was subsequently overturned). But at Ulbricht’s brutal sentencing she railed against the idealistic black marketeer less for trade in disfavored intoxicants than for trying to create a marketplace that “was better than the laws of this country.” That he actually succeeded seemed to deeply offend her. Bharara is a “bit of a prig” (in the words of New York magazine’s Chris Smith) who likes to publicly scold others for perceived moral failings. He’s been scolded in turn, by Reason writers, for his conduct in the Silk Road case, the treatment of an Indian diplomat in a dispute over pay for a housekeeper, and his general disregard for personal freedom. Bharara is also a Chuck Schumer crony and Obama appointee who campaigned for the Attorney General nomination before Loretta Lynch got the nod. That this crew would abuse the power of their offices to target a publication that regularly criticizes the government with which they so closely identify and that sponsors their careers is no surprise. It’s the outcome that Reason’s writers have advised readers to expect from powerful officials anytime they are allowed access to coercive power beyond the bare minimum.

Which is to say, there’s a certain “I told you so” satisfaction as a Reason staffer to railing against powerful government for years, only to be the victim of authoritarian predations worse than anything we had any cause to expect. We’d warned that officials are thin-skinned, convinced of their own superiority over mere mortals, and prone to use every tool at their disposal as bludgeons against personal and state enemies. Damned if we weren’t right.  Never again will our opponents be able to credibly accuse of us of overstating the case when we warn that the American state apparatus is out of hand. Because our readers were targeted by a bunch of political goons and we were threatened with legal consequences if we publicly objected!

But we could do without the vindication.

Frankly, after laboring under an official ban on speaking out against a despicable government assault, it’s easy to embrace the Reason commenters’ antipathy toward the powers that be, if not their prescribed solutions. In fact, it’s tempting to wish for this case to culminate in Preet Bharara, Frank Maas, Niketh Velamoor, and Katherine Forrest savagely clawing at one another in a desperate struggle for the final seat on the last flight out. Because, while America should always have room for people who respect liberty and value vigorous debate, they don’t share that respect. This country is entirely too good for the likes of them.

But it’s enough if the damage they’ve done leads to the offices they hold being stripped of the power to do such harm again.

Oh, and if you haven’t heard about this little incident from your favorite news outlets, perhaps you should contact them and ask why.