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.”

Wait until mommy gets the bill for this.

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.

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.

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.

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

• Bank of America and Delta Airlines have stopped their sponsorship.
• But The New York Times and CNN are still sponsors.

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.

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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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,

• with Starbucks. Or,
• with the rise of automated ordering at fast-food restaurants. Or,
• with that San Francisco bookstore that was destroyed by a minimum wage increase it had supported.

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.

Which of these things are heavily regulated/subsidized by the Government and which are in the free market?

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.

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.

Business 101: When paying an employee, you have to pay in line with their productivity.

• If you underpay, you lose the employee.
• If you overpay, you run up losses and lose your business.
• If you raise the hourly wage, you must get more from each employee hour – and you must cut the hours/employees that won’t or can’t rise to the new, higher bar.

You may have seen the following last week, but I didn’t want to let it pass without comment. After raising wages over the last 18 months, Starbucks and its employees have been learning some lessons the hard way:

An online petition accus[es] Starbucks Corp of “extreme” cutbacks in work hours at its U.S. cafes…

[Starbucks] recently introduced technology that allows customers to order and pay from mobile devices. That service aims to…reduce bottlenecks in stores. [ed: reducing the number of employees needed per shift]

Starbucks has a software system that determines labor needs based on business trends…
Comments on the petition painted a picture of broad discontent at the company…
…many signers say they noticed cutbacks in U.S. staffing hours…
One central California store has seen its labor allotment shrunk by about 10 percent, even though sales are up…
“No matter what we do to save on labor at my store, the system tells us EVERY SINGLE DAY that we are at least 8 hours over in labor for the day and have to cut even more,” wrote [a petition] signer…

Like other restaurants and retail companies, Starbucks is wrestling with the effects of local minimum wage increases…tipping has fallen substantially amid broad customer adoption of the “Starbucks Rewards” program, which allows customers to pay with a loyalty card or mobile phones.

Suppose Starbucks gives in and boosts employee hours (arbitrarily; without a matching, widespread sales & productivity gain). What happens then? Operating budget overruns and closing stores. And/or price increases, declining sales, and closing stores. Perhaps eventually, a closing company. Thanks, Blue State lefties!

UPDATE: This oldie from The Guardian in 2014 may help us to see the problem:

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In 1912, testifying before Congress, the banking giant J.P. Morgan famously said “Money is gold, nothing else.” The quote is often repeated in a fake-but-accurate form as “Gold is money, everything else is credit.”

On and off for 15 years, I’ve read/thought about why that is so; especially in view of the people (both Left and Right) who deny it. I thought I would lay out the answer for anyone with eyes to see.

According to the IMF, money is a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. It arose as an improvement on barter.

Instead of having to directly barter my apples for your oranges, I would trade my perishable apples to some third party for a particular, third good. Wait…Why would I do that? I would do it if the third good is generic, non-perishable, popular (widely admired and valued), limited in supply, and easily handled and stored. Then I can KNOW that you’ll take it trade for your oranges, and the doctor will take it from you in trade for his services, and the baker from the doctor, and so on, forever.

Right there, we can see that real money is some physical good that society’s marketplace finds to be sufficiently generic, non-perishable, popular, supply-limited and easily moved/stored – so that the marketplace will use it as a medium of exchange, and then logically also as a unit of account and a store of value. It could be shells, cattle, salt, cigarettes. But most societies in human history found that silver and gold made the best money, and then mainly gold.

In technical terms, gold is money because it is the good that has the slowest-declining marginal utility.

In layman’s terms (saying much the same thing), gold is the most marketable and hoardable good; the one good that any sane trader would always want a little more of. Oil, apples, wheat, cattle, U.S. Treasury bonds, Bitcoin, Whitney Houston CDs, etc. are not like that.

“But gold is useless!” anti-gold people will say. “It’s a pet rock!” Sorry, but that is a feature not a bug (as they say in software engineering). The fact that gold isn’t needed for some other crucial use is ONE of the reasons why it is so hoardable, and became the most important money.

(Other reasons, shared partly but NOT entirely by silver, are that it’s beautiful and artistic, straight women love it, it’s enduring / corrosion-proof, it’s divisible, it’s ultra-generic as a mere element on the periodic table, it’s compact, it’s user-friendly because almost anyone can hold it and understand what it is, it’s somewhat rare but not too rare – and again, you’re always OK with owning a little more of it. But I digress.)

In the West today, gold is no longer currency. Currency is a representation of money that gets used in a modern country’s daily life. Originally, currency was claim checks (called banknotes) on actual gold or silver at a bank. But today, we use dollars, euro, yen, etc. And what are those things? They’re inventions of certain government-sponsored banks.

They come into existence by decree, or by the mere click of a keyboard; thus the term, “fiat currency”. In effect, a fiat currency is non-redeemable shares in a particular central bank’s assets. (Yes. On each central bank’s balance sheet, the currency + bank reserves that it has created are the major part of the Liabilities + Equity column.)

And what do central banks hold as assets? Lots of financial-system crap – including government bonds, sub-prime mortgage bonds (what caused the 2008 financial crisis), other currencies, and even company stocks (the Swiss central bank is big on Apple). Plus, some gold. The top central banks hold thousands of tons.

And of those central-bank assets, which is the best and most important? Hint: Gold is the only asset in the financial system that can ever be free of “counterparty risk”; that is, the only asset which isn’t also somebody else’s liability.

A bond is somebody else’s liability. It is good only if they stay solvent. A government bond is just the government promising to pay some fiat currency, subject to risks like default or hyperinflation. Central-bank gold does not have those risks. Which is why they value it, and why the “safer” or more-prestigious central banks tend to have larger gold reserves, which adds to their strength.

Thus, although the Western world no longer uses gold as currency, it is still the “pet rock” (or Rock of Gibraltar) upon which rest the key central banks, and so the entire financial system. As such, gold is real money. And everything else – from government bonds, all the way down to your bank account and the cash (the fiat currency) in your pocket – is, in the end, mere credit.

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In the area were I live, there are a number of different supermarket options. There’s a Kroger that’s nearly as nice as the Wegman’s “Back East,” and another Kroger that’s as a nasty as the Weis “back East.” There’s a chain of upscale fresh/organic supermarkets, clean and immaculate. And Another large supermarket is in the midst of a massive renovation and upgrade to keep up with the nice Kroger across town.

Someone like Bernie Sanders thinks this is a terrible waste of resources. Supermarkets remodeling when “children are going hungry?” Oh, how awful. And why do there need to be so many different options for people to get their food? And, you know, people don’t always make the kind of nutrition choices the Government would like them to.  Wouldn’t it be more efficient if food were simply distributed at plain gray warehouses by unionized Government employees. You would be assigned one food distribution center in your district and that would be the one you were required to use. (Or pay exorbitantly to use members-only markets accessible only to party apparatchiks and elites, like in the Soviet Union.) That would, the socialists believe, free up money for things like public education.

Leftists believe they know what’s best for everyone, but the philosophy they embrace is ultimately dehumanizing. Getting your allotment of rations from the State-Run Ration Distribution Center might possibly be more efficient if the system were run to the perfection leftists believe they can achieve (Spoiler Alert: they can’t and it wouldn’t be. Venezuela tried this, it doesn’t work). But in robbing people of the opportunity for choice and self-sufficiency, they also would make the world a far more drab and dreary place.

What Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis are pushing is a philosophy that ultimately dehumanizes and crushes the soul.

The U.S.A., once number one for economic freedom, has sunk to number 12 per the Heritage Foundation. (Top seven: Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Chile.)

Somewhere, some leftist is going “Yeah cool! Because economic freedom sux!” Well then. The U.S.A., once number one as a place to be born, has sunk to number 16 in The Economist magazine’s more Europe-friendly rankings. (Compare to 1988 ranking, here.)

What about political-social freedoms, like freedom of the press? The U.S.A., once number one for that, has sunk to number 49. Behind South Africa, Slovenia, even Germany.

As Reporters Without Borders puts it:

In the United States, 2014 was marked by judicial harassment of New York Times investigative reporter James Risen in connection with the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer charged under the Espionage Act with giving him classified information. US journalists are still not protected by a federal shield law that would guarantee their right not to name their sources or reveal other confidential information about their work. Meanwhile, at least 15 journalists were arbitrarily arrested during clashes between police and demonstrators protesting against black teenager Michael Brown’s fatal shooting…

And where would RPB rank us, if they could consider that our tax authority specially targets our domestic political dissidents (Tea Party conservatives)?

“Thanks, Obama!”

“A wise man can hear profit in the wind. ” — 22nd Rule of Acquisition

Some people consider the price of a McDonald’s “Big Mac” to be a reality check for what is happening to consumer prices. Why?

• Fast food is widely consumed, outside “the one percent”. A Big Mac may be a price that real people pay often.
• The price reflects not only food costs, but also costs for hourly labor and benefits, commercial real estate, transportation, energy, manufacturing equipment and packaging.
• Until a few years ago, changes in the price of a Big Mac tracked changes in the government CPI (Consumer Price Index) fairly well.

In recent years, Big Macs have gone up rather more than the CPI. Why? Several different explanations could be put forward. The least likely explanation is that McDonald’s has suddenly become inefficient at making Big Macs.

Another possible explanation is that the government keeps toying with how it calculates CPI, looking for ways to understate consumer price inflation. That is, to hide it. Which is in the government’s direct, financial interest: that way, the government can make smaller inflation adjustments to Social Security, income tax brackets, inflation-indexed bonds, etc. Plus the political optics are better.

Courtesy of Forbes, Big Mac Index Shows Official CPI Underreports Inflation:

What is the graph saying?

• In 1996, the average Big Mac cost $2.36.
• Going by the government CPI (and assuming Big Macs are still a good reality check), the average Big Mac in 2013 should have cost $3.49.
• But it really cost $4.33, which is a lot more. (The price virtually doubled in 17 years; and of the increase, nearly half is “unexpected” by the CPI.)
• The increase started in the early Naughties, but more of it is recent, in the last six years.

So, whom do you believe? Our noble government which always looks out for you? Or your lyin’ eyes, when you go to buy a Big Mac?

I believe my eyes. I’m more likely to to hit Starbucks or In-N-Out Burger than McDonald’s; but in all 3 cases, I’m always a little shocked at how their prices have gone up from 10, 5 or even just 1-2 years ago. Poor people, who may eat at fast-food restaurants often, must really feel it.

Bonus question: Why would things have changed in the last six years? Who has been in charge of the government – that is, both the CPI calculation, and our general economic policies?

Some might disagree with my view that the U.S. is a centrally-planned economy (and thus, non-capitalist; more of a social-fascist economy). But it is. A central planning board carefully rigs the three most important features of a large economy: its interest rates, its money supply, and the practices of its financial markets and banks.

Of course, that doesn’t mean our economy always co-operates with our brave central planners. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that our planners even have a clue. This chart (via ZH) shows some of their cluelessness:

It tells a story like this:

• In 2009, they thought publicly forecast that they’d have interest rates back to normal by 2011.
• In 2010, they publicly forecast that they’d be rigging up some normal rates by 2012.
• And so on, with each new year. Today, they forecast having normal rates by 2016-17.

These are some of the very people (*cough* Janet Yellen) who had no clue that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis was coming.

As to the economy: If it were recovering (for real) all these years, interest rates would indeed have been back to normal by 2010-11. But our economy hasn’t been recovering much, all these years. Just the markets. (Oh, wait.)

From France24 (via Zero Hedge):

Hours after he won the economics Nobel Prize, [Jean] Tirole said he felt “sad” the French economy was experiencing difficulties…

France is plagued by record unemployment and Tirole described the French job market as “catastrophic”…arguing that the excessive protection for employees had frozen the country’s job market.

“We haven’t succeeded also in downsizing the state, which is an issue because we have a social model that I approve of – I’m very much in favour of this social model – but it won’t be sustainable if the state is too big,” he added…there will not be “enough money to pay for it in the long run”.

He doesn’t quite make the connection, that a social model which is unsustainable (his notion) is not any sort of model that any economist should “approve” of.

But for awhile there, he almost made sense.

Apple, Facebook will pay for female employees to freeze their eggs:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc and Facebook Inc will help pay for female employees to freeze their eggs…

From January, Apple will pay both full- and part-time employees up to $20,000 for procedure and storage costs for female employees to freeze their eggs.

“We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended maternity leave policy, along with cryopreservation and egg storage as part of our extensive support for infertility treatments,” Apple said in a statement.

I’m pretty sure that Apple already covered its employees’ *medical fertility problems*. (If that’s mistaken, please correct me in the comments.) Something else must be new here. What is it?

Could it be, a benefit for egg-freezing as a pure career move? Let’s see:

“We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families.”

NBC News reported on Tuesday that Facebook recently began covering egg-freezing for non-medical reasons…

Egg freezing is a pricey but increasingly popular option for women. It enables women to delay child bearing…

A sign of the times. Now that Facebook/Apple woman can freeze her eggs at 30, work years of 80 hour weeks, and then at 50 when she’s pulling 300K a year (and naturally infertile), pay a surrogate to do that other part of her life for her – you know, having kids from her eggs.

Honestly, I see nothing wrong with it – if she’s doing it all with her own money. The issue I see here is, Apple and Facebook are choosing to engage in a form of discrimination against their employees who don’t make (or shall we say, don’t need to make) that particular, optional choice.

Remember, the money comes from somewhere: the overall “employee comp” budget. Rather than pay tens of thousands of dollars for a hugely *optional* procedure for a special category of employee, why would Facebook/Apple not raise all employees’ bonuses by (say) a thousand dollars? That would empower far more women (and men, and transgenders) and be much more fair.

The free market will (or should) ultimately decide if Apple and Facebook have done the right thing here. In the meantime, some people appear not to grasp that freezing your eggs – purely as a career move – is optional:

“Egg freezing gives women more control,” said Jennifer Tye, marketing lead for Glow, a mobile application aimed at helping women avoid pregnancy or conceive.

“When I turned 30, I had this notion that my biological clock was ticking, but I didn’t know what my options were,” said Tye.

Really? At 30, she didn’t know what her options were? I hope she was misquoted; if not, it’s mind-boggling stupidity.

Jonah Goldberg makes a great distinction:

…the difference between being pro-business and pro-market is categorical. A politician who is a “friend of business” is exactly that, a guy who does favors for his friends. A politician who is pro-market is a referee who will refuse to help protect his friends (or anyone else) from competition unless the competitors have broken the rules. The friend of business supports industry-specific or even business-specific loans, grants, tariffs, or tax breaks. The pro-market referee opposes special treatment for anyone.

Goldberg’s point is that the GOP must make up its mind about which one it is. Pro-business is crony capitalism, venture socialism and Big Government as we know it today. Pro-market is more the Tea Party putting real checks on Washington. Goldberg describes the GOP’s dilemma in more detail; RTWT.

To make my view clear: I am not pro-business, I am absolutely pro-market. The mentality that the economy would boom (and America would be great again) if only we could vote in smart people to tinker with the economy in good ways – if only the Republicans had power to do better Washington-y things than the Democrats do – that mentality is part of what has gotten America into a hole.

The truth is, nothing that government does to rig interfere with markets and business outcomes is ever much good. It never turns out anything as well as the politicians said it would, and never as well as what markets – that is, free people – could do, if left to their own devices.