GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Kinky Boots

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A 13 year old movie that (maybe inadvertently) celebrates the Free Market in the context of gender dysphoria.

The story begins with the sad closing of a family-owned shoe factory in northern UK. The factory’s product just can’t compete with cheaper imports. One by one, loyal long-term employees are laid off. By chance, the young man inheriting the factory meets a drag queen, who in passing complains that the women’s shoes he wears keep breaking under his weight. No one has bothered serving this market, which would require making risqué shoes in women’s styles but men’s sizes.

It seems like a good opportunity, but can traditional blue-collar factory workers be persuaded to work with, and for, drag queen customers? As though moved by Adam Smith’s invisible hand, everyone learns to get along in the name of getting on with business.
Unlikely as this scenario may seem, it’s based on the true story of WJ Brooks & Co., a UK shoe manufacturing company founded in 1889, but which floundered in the 1990s under competition from imports, until it discovered and began manufacturing to serve the transgender market.

This is a decidedly upbeat comedy with strong social tolerance and pro-entrepreneurial themes. Happily, it was made in 2005, before social justice warriors started demanding separate bathrooms for transgenders, individualized pronouns, etc., so it’s not about anyone forcing anything on anyone else, just about learning to peaceably tolerate each other.

Ah, yes… the Good Old Days when the left claimed all they wanted was tolerance. Before they came to power and demanded absolute submission. It’s why I don’t trust any leftist who says “Nobody wants to confiscate your guns.”

The real minimum wage is $0

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A week ago, Zero Hedge reported on a study that Seattle’s minimum wage law is costing workers their income and jobs.

…boosting pay in low-wage jobs by about 3 percent since 2014 but also resulting in a 9 percent reduction in hours worked in such jobs. That resulted in a 6 percent drop in what employers collectively pay…

The report also estimated that there are about 5,000 fewer low-wage jobs in the city than there would have been…

But St. Louis workers face better times. The Missouri legislature passed a pre-emption law to invalidate that city’s hike.

Preemption laws are becoming increasingly popular in GOP-controlled states as cities – typically bastions of liberal sentiment – try to raise minimum wages above statewide minimum levels…

…at least 17 states have preemption laws that stand in the way of local minimum wage legislation, according to a recent study by the National League of Cities…

Sadly, MO Governor Eric Greitens, who is a gun-toting conservative hunk of delicious beefcake, was less-than-bold about it:

Fearing the political backlash…Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens wouldn’t affix his signature to the bill; Missouri’s constitution stipulates that bills that go unsigned by the governor automatically become law.

What happens in general, when wages go up too far, too fast? China has the answer.

Manufacturers, squeezed by rising labor costs and a paucity of skilled workers, are fueling an unprecedented boom in the adoption of automated technologies to cut down on the number of workers needed on factory floors, according to the latest findings of the China Employer-Employee Survey.

Ironically, the Communist Party’s willingness to support unprofitable businesses is compounding problems for Chinese workers, as many manufacturers are barely profitable to begin with.

Remember that video of China’s parcel-sorting robots? Or, closer to home, we could talk about McDonald’s replacing its cashiers with kiosks.

All this time, we’ve been in a Great Depression

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A few weeks back, Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse blog looked at U.S. GDP growth rates for the ten years 1930-1939 and the ten years 2007-2016. I didn’t verify his numbers but they seem plausible (referring to “real” or inflation-adjusted GDP). Snyder says:

1930: -8.5%
1931: -6.4%
1932: -12.9%
1933: -1.3%
1934: 10.8%
1935: 8.9%
1936: 12.9%
1937: 5.1%
1938: -3.3%
1939: 8.0%

When you average all of those years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.

That is really bad, but it is the kind of number that one would expect from “the Great Depression”.

So then I looked up the numbers for the last ten years…

2007: 1.8%
2008: -0.3%
2009: -2.8%
2010: 2.5%
2011: 1.6%
2012: 2.2%
2013: 1.7%
2014: 2.4%
2015: 2.6%
2016: 1.6%

When you average these years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.

The same! But wait, averaging them isn’t quite right. For math-y reasons, it’s better to take a starting index value like 100, then apply the growth rates year by year. I did that, and

  • Real GDP grew 10% from 1930-1939.
  • Real GDP grew 14% from 2007-2016.

Still not much difference! The point remains that the last 10 years have been super lame. President Obama was perhaps the first in U.S. history to never have a single year of real GDP growth over 3%.

And it’s possible that Obama’s record was yet worse. Remember, in recent years they’ve been padding the GDP numbers. They directly added nonsense to GDP. They also under-estimate inflation, which artificially boosts the growth estimates.

But for now, let’s stick with official numbers (where Obama’s overall record is nearly as bad as a Great Depression), and pivot to look at unemployment.

You may wonder: if we’ve been in a depression, how could the unemployment rate be down at 5%? The difference from the 1930s is that, in our time, the Establishment (or Political-Financial Complex) has been determined to fool people – to boil the frog (us) slowly, so to speak – and to cover for President Lightworker. Thus,

  • They let him jack the national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. Even a monkey could make GDP seem halfway-OK for 8 years, if you gave him a $10 trillion credit card.
  • They had the central bank (Federal Reserve) conjure trillions of new money from thin air and inject it into the financial markets. It’s chicanery, but people say “At least my home and 401k are up.”
  • And they baked the unemployment statistics. Remember, the official 5% number hides a huge decline in Labor Force Participation, plus full-time jobs being replaced with crappy part-time jobs.
    • If you add back the people who left the labor force in despair these last ten years, real unemployment is 11-12%.
    • And if you add the extra part-timers (assuming they would rather be full-time), it’s even worse.

Depression 2.0 has been with us, all this time. It’s part of why people were so unhappy with Queen Cersei in 2016 (who ran as the Establishment’s poster child).

What does all this bode for President Trump? Probably not well.

  • He’s trimmed back some of Obama’s growth-killing regulations. That will help.
  • And his infrastructure spending may go to productive works (unlike Obama’s 2009 “Porkulus” package), if he can get it passed. He wants to revive American manufacturing, which would be good.
  • BUT, with so much debt on the books and so many Americans expecting handouts, our underlying economic problems are worse than ever.

Trump has inherited a sinking ship. The next recession should be a roller-coaster. If the American Left is krazy and violent now, just you wait.

Then again, maybe our leadership will hit on the solution quickly (a Free Enterprise system with smaller government, Rule of Law, sound money, cutting the Welfare-Warfare State, letting Washington and Wall Street fail, letting Main Street pick up the pieces). And maybe our leadership will use the media skillfully (plus a few well-placed arrests) to transition people’s minds to all that. Don’t tell me I’m dreaming.

OK, I’m dreaming. Time to buy more ammo.

Manphobia hits new lows

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In left-wing Berlin, Germany, we now have a crackdown on advertising that would dare to depict women as “nurturing, happy to do housework, beautiful, addicted to shopping” or men as “rational, aggressive, technologically gifted”.

Get it? Ads must feature unpleasant, unattractive, angry feminists disposing of pathetically weak and foolish men.

Boys must not be shown as “liking sports, the colour blue, and playing with technology”. According to these German feminists(!), girls are so stupid and deficient by nature that when they “see images of heterosexual housewives, the consequence is that they cannot imagine themselves outside this framework.”

Meanwhile in Madrid, they banned ‘manspreading’. Because God Forfend that a man on a bus should sit a bit comfortably. Crowder explains it to women and gets some to admit to the existence of female privilege.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen…

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To follow up on that Shakespeare in the Park thing where President Trump is Julius Caesar and they assassinate him:

Caesar Flickerman, speaking in his alter ego of Fareed Zakaria at CNN, said “If you’re in NYC, go see Julius Caesar, free in Central Park, brilliantly interpreted for Trump era. A masterpiece”. (Yes, Zakaria tweeted that.)

Whereas Delta said “No matter what your political stance may be, the graphic staging of Julius Caesar at this summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta Air Lines’ values.” BofA said “The Public Theater chose to present Julius Caesar in a way that was intended to provoke and offend. Had this intention been made known to us, we would have decided not to sponsor it.”

The irony, of course, is that the staging only creates sympathy for Trump. Rightly or wrongly, history ranks Caesar as one of its Great Men. The pack of Senators stabbing him look like cowards. The general bloodiness of the staging reminds people how sick and tasteless America’s “progressives” are.

UPDATE – The Left’s revenge-shakedown begins: C-list celebrities want to boycott Delta, BofA. Because they stopped paying out for the Trump-assassinating Public Theater.

Why socialism always puts bad people in charge

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In Monday night’s Venezuela post, our wise commenters said:

socialism doesn’t work because it is an unjust economic system. the people in power take things from people that work…

The wrong people will ALWAYS be in charge, because for socialism to work you have to have completely altruistic people in charge…

Yes. Except, it’s even worse than that 😉 The biggest problems with socialism are:

  1. It wrecks the Price Mechanism. Even if you had truly altruistic people in charge, such an economy still can’t function.
  2. Only bad-or-stupid people want a wrecked price mechanism. Thus, only bad-or-stupid people advocate socialism. And the bad people know how to shepherd the stupid people; thus, the bad people always end up in charge.

By Price Mechanism, I mean free markets discovering and signalling the prices of things. To review how that works:

  • All goods and services must be rationed, by one means or another.
    • because human needs are infinite
    • whereas human time (used to produce goods and services) is not
  • Markets ration things by having people pay a market price for the available supply.
    • If something is in short supply, those who have the highest “score” in terms of being both able and willing to pay, will get it.
    • “Willing” as in, free will / the person’s choice.
  • The market price moves up and down, accomplishing two big things as it does so.
    1. It coordinates people’s consumption activities. (Those who are unwilling or unable to pay for a thing at its current price, look for substitutes.)
    2. It coordinates people’s production activities. (As a thing’s price moves higher, it induces people to produce more of it.)
  • The coordination is spontaneous and responsive to changing conditions, because it is voluntary.
  • If you interfere with the price mechanism, you interfere with (or even block) that coordination.

OK, so the price mechanism is objectively great. It induces voluntary coordination among vast numbers of people – thus enabling the Division of Labor. Who would want to mess with that?

The answer is: People who gain by interactions that are not voluntary. People such as moochers, thieves, thugs, politicians and bureaucrats. People who lack the ability or willingness to produce. People who hope to live by altering or preventing market outcomes. People who think they can plan and control others better than those others can. People who are willing to gain by keeping others down.

In short: People who gain by dictatorship. Arrogant people who enjoy using force on others to prevent the peaceful activities and outcomes that people would otherwise create on their own.

That’s the nature of socialism. It’s not a noble ideal. It’s a curse, an evil. Like the Mafia, it’s always led by bad people because it *is* bad, in its nature. It can never be desired by people who are both good-hearted and knowledgeable. Therefore, it can never be led by them. And, even if it were somehow, it still wouldn’t function – because of the wrecked price mechanism.

This feeds into how the term “socialism” is defined.

  • An old, strict definition is: public ownership of the means of production.
  • But people today use the word with a much broader meaning: Any system where a governing authority intervenes in markets, preventing the market price mechanism from operating.

The socialist planners always proclaim their good intentions. And they always make things worse. And it’s not an accident or a failure to apply socialism; it’s inherent in socialism.

Wrecking the price mechanism kills spontaneous, voluntary coordination; and that’s the point of the thing. It’s why stupid-or-bad people love socialism. They WANT to control others and prevent market outcomes. It’s not a proverbial “unforeseen consequence”; it’s the point.

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Serving them right

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On certain issues, leftist harping is especially odious. One is the minimum wage.

Anyone who has met a payroll knows that, when higher wages are simply dictated from on high, then employees (or hours or salaries) must be cut back elsewhere – assuming the business can survive at all. It’s math. We’ve seen it before,

Leftists like to deny math and other facts of business and economics. What makes it odious is, they’re also smug about it. It isn’t just their ignorance; it’s their aggressive pride in staying ignorant.

Via HotAir, now a study confirms that San Francisco’s minimum wage does indeed injure the businesses and workers of that city.

San Francisco’s higher minimum wage is causing an increasing number of restaurants to go out of business even before it is fully phased in, a new study by the Harvard Business School found.

The closings were concentrated among struggling, lower-rated restaurants. The higher minimum also caused fewer new restaurants to open, it found.

“We provide suggestive evidence that higher minimum wage increases overall exit rates among restaurants, where a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of exit,” report Dara Lee and Michael Luca, authors of “Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit.” The study used as a case study San Francisco, which has an estimated 6,000 restaurants in the Bay Area and is ratcheting up its minimum wage.

So, Nancy Pelosi and her fellow limousine-socialists are looking at fewer restaurant selections for themselves – and more unemployed people. Do they understand that? Or even notice it?

There is only one time when the minimum wage doesn’t hurt employment: When it’s low enough, in real terms, to be ineffectual. For example, if we have a period of inflation – and no minimum wage increases – then its real value will go down, and employers can afford to hire the low-end workers again. But the higher the minimum wage is, in real terms: the more low-end workers can’t get work.

Maybe We Should Be a Bit More Like Somalia

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People of a conservative/libertarian persuasion believe that our current level of Government is overbearing, intrusive, and far too expensive to be sustainable; that it should be reduced in size to a level that doesn’t crush individual freedom or free enterprise, and is fiscally sustainable. (This is what the left calls “radical extremism.)

It’s a common trope on the left to respond to such a suggestion with, “Oh, so you HATE police, and fire protection, and infrastructure! Because those are things that only GOVERNMENT can provide. You must want to DESTROY the Government and live like SOMALIA!” Because to the left’s limited way of thinking, the only alternative to bloated, expensive, corrupt, bureaucratic, all-intrusive Government is the other extreme, anarchy. The idea of a limited Government, doing a limited number of necessary things is something the left is simply unable to conceptualize.

reducto

Getting back to Somalia; it actually turns out that Government is *not* necessary to provide basic infrastructure and private enterprise actually does it pretty well, given a chance; even in a dystopian warzone.

The cell phone is itself a key player in the two decades of civil war in Somalia. By 2000 clan militias and warlords had created enough stability to enable growth in commercial activity. For example, by 2004 three cell phone companies competed to provide service ($10 a month for free local calls, 50 cents a minute for international calls and 50 cents an hour to get on the Internet.) Each new cell phone transmitter installed required that the local clan chief or warlord get a payment. Everyone recognizes the value of the new phone service, after having gone without for years after the old government run phone company was looted and destroyed. As a result, phone company equipment really is protected by the clans and warlords, who do not want to lose their dial tone. The new phone service is cheaper and more reliable than the old government owned landline phone network. This is because there is competition, no government bureaucracy and no taxes (other than the necessary bribes and security payments). There is some fear that if a new government gets established well enough regulations and taxes will greatly increase the cost of service, and reduce reliability. Not yet and for years all of Somalia had better, and cheaper, phone service than any of the other nations in the region. But that’s another story. Even al Shabaab had to respect the cell phone network, even though they tried to shut down cell towers some of the time to avoid detection. Al Shabaab lost that battle. Cell phone service became one of the things nearly all Somalis would fight for.