URLs du Jour

2007-01-03

  • Kip Esquire aims withering fire on "universal health care". Key line:
    Universal health care: A lie inside a fraud wrapped in an ulterior motive...
    Kip attacks on a number of fronts, some you've probably considered before, some maybe not.

  • At the CEI Open Market blog, Chris Homer detects cold and calculated cynicism in the NYT's recent article which showers Strange New Respect on global warming non-alarmists.
    In so doing, the Times thereby also helpfully rationalizes their political allies' looming failure/refusal to do precisely what they have pounded the table intemperantly for for nearly six years, which is now within their grasp, and which therefore appears far less inviting: rapid — and, we now know, rash — enactment of stringent restrictions on energy use emissions. With the gavel about to switch hands, the Times apparently (and rightly) sensed that this would be a difficult task to affect while simultaneously seeking to maintain a new and fragile majority and also capture the White House.
    Don't worry, though. The CEI folks ("and their ilk") are still despised and vilified heretics in NYT-land, so the world hasn't turned all the way upside down.

  • Also enjoyable are a couple of reductio ad absurdum arguments concerning minimum wage legislation. First, from Greg Mankiw:
    Consider this policy aimed to help workers at the bottom of the income distribution:

    1. A wage subsidy for unskilled workers, paid for by
    2. A tax on employers who hire unskilled workers.

    Now, if you think like an economist, you might wonder about the logic of part 2 of this proposal. You might say, "A tax on the hiring of unskilled workers would discourage their employment, offsetting some of the benefits they would get from the wage subsidy. It would be better to finance the wage subsidy with a more general tax, rather than with a tax targeted specifically on employers of unskilled workers."

    I agree. So why did I bring up this proposal?

    Because it looks just like … guess what?

    Second, from Don Boudreaux:

    Why doesn't government require each employer to hire a minimum number of full-time employees? If, as the proponents of modest increases in the minimum-wage argue, "reasonable" government mandates that raise the costs of running a business have little or no ill effect on the labor market, why not also legislate — in addition to a minimum-wage — a "minimum workforce"?

  • But it's not all shameless recycling of libertarian talking points here at Pun Salad today; we also recycle conservative talking points. Jonah Goldberg has assigned a wonderfully apt label to something I'd previously noticed, the media's tendency to lionize conservatives once they're safely pushin' up daisies: the Tito Puente Effect.

Last Modified 2007-01-03 7:43 PM EDT