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David Harsanyi puts the olympics in proper context.
A few months prior to the 2008 Summer Olympics games in Beijing, there was an Olympic torch running ceremony in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. There, the nation’s Communist Party leader, Zhang Qingli, declared that “China’s red flag with five stars will forever flutter high above this land” before dropping a bit Jesse Myerson-ish rhetoric on folks, explaining that China would “totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama clique.”
Qingli saw the Olympics as optimal moment to launch into some political haranguing, because the Olympics is a political event. Always has been. And sporadically, regimes in various stages of authoritarianism, say the Nazis or the Chinese Communists or the Russian Putinists, use this overhyped and overrated sporting exhibition to try and convince others of the superiority of their regimes. This is why the Germans made a spectacle in 1936, why the Soviets spent decades trying to create Ivan Dragos — and also why, the 1980 United States ice hockey victory over Soviet Union team was, for many of us, the greatest sports moment of all time.
Here’s how Charles Lane put it in a superb column detailing the uselessness of the event:
Whatever might be said for that idea in theory, it hasn’t panned out in practice. The ostensibly apolitical Games have been marred by several boycotts — of Montreal in 1976 (by African nations protesting apartheid), of Moscow in 1980 (by the United States and other Western countries protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) and of Los Angeles in 1984 (by communist countries retaliating for 1980).
The Games also have created a target for extremists, from the Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 to ultra-rightist Eric Rudolph, who placed a deadly bomb at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Consequently, these celebrations of international conviviality proceed under heavy military guard.
On the bright side, Sochi has been utter embarrassment for Vladimir Putin …
Victor Davis Hanson says California has two droughts; the first is lack of water, the second is lack of common sense.
There is little snow in the state’s towering Sierra Nevada mountains, the source of much of the surface water that supplies the state’s populated center and south. The vast Central Valley aquifer is being tapped as never before, as farms and municipalities deepen wells and boost pump size. Too many straws are now competing to suck out the last drops at the bottom of the collective glass.
The vast 4-million-acre farming belt along the west side of the Central Valley is slowly drying up. Unlike valley agriculture to the east, which still has a viable aquifer, these huge farms depend entirely on surface water deliveries from the distant and usually wet northern part of the state. So if the drought continues, billions of dollars of Westside orchards and vineyards will die, row cropland will lay fallow, and farm-supported small towns will likewise dry up. …
… Yet there are really two droughts — nature’s and its man-made twin. In the early 1980s, when the state had not much more than half its current population, an affluent coastal corridor convinced itself that nirvana was possible, given the coastal world-class universities, the new dot.com riches of Silicon Valley, the year-round temperate weather, and the booming entertainment, tourism, and wine industries. …
… The California disease is characteristic of comfortable postmodern societies that forget the sources of their original wealth. The state may have the most extensive reserves of gas and oil in the nation, the largest number of cars on the road — and the greatest resistance to drilling for fuel beneath its collective feet. After last summer’s forest fires wiped out a billion board feet of timber, we are still arguing over whether loggers will be allowed to salvage such precious lumber, or instead should let it rot to enhance beetle and woodpecker populations.
In 2014, nature yet again reminded California just how fragile — and often pretentious — a place it has become.
Just north of CA is another state making bad choices Joel Kotkin has the story of Oregon which has some factories that have fled CA, but unfortunately also has some ideas that came from some of CA’s flakiest.
Oregon is a beautiful place, and, for many of the state’s well-heeled residents, including many refugees from equally beautiful but overpriced California, economic growth not only is unimportant but is even a negative. Rather than create opportunity, the real issue, according to Gov. John Kitzhaber, is making sure the state ranks high on “the happiness index.” Forget sweating the hard stuff, and cozy up with a hot soy latte.
There’s a problem with this. Oregon’s unemployment rate remains above the national average and underemployment – the measure of people working part-time or well below their skill level – stands at nearly 17 percent, behind only Nevada and California. Since 2007, the state has lost over 3.4 percent of its jobs, a performance much worse than the national average and even California.
“You have to wonder about the rhetoric of happiness,” suggests economist Bill Watkins, who predicts the state won’t be back to 2007 employment levels till next year. “You need jobs for people to be happy, you would think.”
This dearth of opportunity extends even into Portland, the state’s dominant city. One recent study showed that earnings for educated males in the city are among the worst in the country. Portland, the land of Ph.D.’s driving cabs and working in coffee shops, notes geographer Jim Russell, “attracts talent for the sake of attracting talent” but does little with them once they arrive. No surprise then that the place has become widely described the “slacker capital of the world.”
Indeed, notes economist Bill Watkins, Oregon over the past five years has lagged in job growth behind not only the nation, but, in particular, its demographic twin, Washington state. Seattle has emerged as the most potent competitor to Silicon Valley, while Oregon’s tech sector is largely propped up by Intel’s plant in suburban Hillsboro, itself a byproduct of California’s regulatory over-reach. There has been no widespread stirring of tech, or for that matter, any strong industry in Oregon. …
From Forbes Magazine we learn about another unintended consequence of the affordable care act. And one more bureaucrat learns a lesson we must all pay for.
After the flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act, most of Washington focused on repairing and delaying the law’s most obvious problems. However, a handful of lawmakers have finally noticed one of the law’s hidden regulations: a strict calorie labeling requirement for chain restaurants, vending machines, and other food distributors. What at first appeared to be more bureaucratic but harmless government do-gooding is now proving a verifiable nightmare for small business owners and federal regulators alike. …
… The calorie label clause, buried deep within the ACA’s 10,000 pages, seems harmless enough at first glance. Each restaurant chain with over 20 locations is required to display the calorie content of each food and drink item it serves on signs and printed menus–with vending machine distributors subjected to the same rules. But the regulation also covers “similar retail food establishments,” a clause vague enough to give FDA regulators sweeping power to determine who does and doesn’t have to comply.
FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg admitted that she “actually thought [calorie labeling] would be one of the more straightforward tasks…but little did I know how complicated it would be.” Hamburg’s concerns are hardly unfounded, but it’s small business owners and franchisees—not FDA bureaucrats—that will feel the most pain under the new law. …
Mark Perry posts on the NY Times when they had some sense.
It’s pretty amazing how the New York Times editorial board has changed its position over the last 27 years on the government-mandated wage floor that guarantees reduced employment opportunities for America’s teenagers and low-skilled workers:
Here’s what the NY Times editorial wrote in January 1987 (“The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00“):
There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. Most important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.
If a higher minimum means fewer jobs, why does it remain on the agenda of some liberals? A higher minimum would undoubtedly raise the living standard of the majority of low-wage workers who could keep their jobs. That gain, it is argued, would justify the sacrifice of the minority who became unemployable. The argument isn’t convincing. Those at greatest risk from a higher minimum would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs.
The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable – and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.
What a change, following several decades of “economic amnesia” at the NY Times, which editorialized in today’s paper (“The Case for a Higher Minimum Wage“): …