Pun Salad

Slightly relevant to last month's post about alleged Fox News brain-rot.

Also of note:

• Coulda put a period after "Think". I keep linking to Jeff Maurer because he's funny, and willing to take on the fools on "his side" of the political divide. Today's lesson: Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman Demonstrate How to Not Think About Economics.

  The bill is called the The Living Wage for Musicians Act, though a better name would be the Shitty DJs Unite To Reduce Access To Music People Actually Want To Listen To Act. The bill is inconsequential and won’t pass — Tlaib and Bowman are marginalized loons who exist to be thwarted by people who know stuff. But the bill is worth looking at because it’s a museum piece demonstrating the flawed economic thinking that’s common on the far left.

  The bill targets Spotify and its competitors (mostly Apple Music and Amazon). In a statement, Tlaib said that an artist would need more than 800,000 Spotify streams a month to earn the equivalent of a full-time $15/hour job. The bill seeks to triple payments to artist from 0.3 cents per stream to 1 cent per stream (Tlaib’s numbers are debatable but whatever — let’s make this simple and just use her numbers). Tlaib and Bowman would fund this increase in payments in two ways: 1) Subscription fees would rise by 50%, and 2) Payments would be capped at one million streams, and revenue beyond that would go into a fund to pay out the low-earners.

  By my math [footnote elided], this would cost Taylor Swift at least $78 million a year (and probably much more than that). Swift had 26.1 billion streams in 2023, and under Tlaib and Bowman’s plan, she’d make absolutely zilch on 26.088 billion of those. She’d rake in a handsome $10,000/month, and I find it funny to imagine Taylor Swift interacting with an amount of money that is — by her standards — pocket change. If Taylor Swift saw $10,000 on the sidewalk, would she stop to pick it up? If Denny’s overcharged Taylor Swift by $10,000 — as in “whoops, sorry hon, that should be $18.42, not $10,018.42” — would she say something or just pay it? These are interesting thought experiments. But what’s not an interesting thought experiment is what Swift would do if Congress passed a bill requiring a 99.85% reduction in her Spotify revenue: She would take her music off the service, which she’s done before.

  I imagine that could be a task for "dynamic pricing"; dink your prices up by $10K during the few seconds in which Taylor's bill is being calculated.

  And Maurer gets this exactly right:

  I used to think about wages in terms of fairness. I noticed that some people make a lot of money and some make a little, and I also noticed that some of the people who only make a little work very hard. It seemed unfair, and, of course — in a cosmic sense — it is unfair. I’ve worked at Wendy’s, and I’ve written for television, and I worked twice as hard at Wendy’s despite making a fraction of the TV wage. In a similar way, it seems ridiculous that Taylor Swift — whose music I would only listen to as some sort of CIA black-ops site “enhanced interrogation” — should be a billionaire while bands I like struggle.

  When you see the world this way, it’s tempting to pass a law that says “make things fair”. Tlaib and Bowman’s bill is surrounded by the language of fairness — they use terms like “deserve”, “economic justice”, “fair share”, “fair wage”, and “fair compensation”.

  But what do those words mean? They mean nothing in this context. “Fair” is in the eye of the beholder, and every push for more money in human history could be framed as a push for “fairness”. Everything in this area is subjective: Maroon 5 can argue that they deserve a lot of money because people like their music, I can argue that they deserve to be pelted with rotten fruit wherever they go because their music sucks donkey ass, and neither of us is really wrong. “Living wage” is a strange concept because the cost of living depends on your situation. “Hourly wage” is a bonkers concept in music because Paul McCartney woke up with the tune for “Yesterday” in his head, while Guns ‘N Roses spent 17 years making “Chinese Democracy”. Arbitrariness is everywhere in this bill — why is one cent the “fair” rate for a stream? Why is anything over one million streams “too much”? The answer, of course, is that those are meaningless numbers that Tlaib and Bowman are declaring “fair” just because they’re nice and round.

  The minor only sin here is one of omission: Maurer could have, but didn't, note that President Dotard used some variation of "fair" 17 times in his SOTU speech last week.

• On the crack-down watch. As long as I'm control-Fing the SOTU transcript: I see three Presidential promises to "crack down" on

  1. "big landlords" (over six feet?);
  2. "corporations that engage in price-gouging and deceptive pricing";
  3. "gun crime, retail crime and carjacking."
  .

  I have no idea what that last one means; it seems "stop letting these people back on the street" might be an effective strategy.

  But there's also those fees. At Cato, Ryan Bourne and Sophia Bagley check out The Incoherence of the White House’s Anti- “Junk Fees” Agenda. They outline three areas in which coherency is lacking:

  First, there is no firm definition of “junk fees” the administration is sticking to. The White House blog says “junk fees” “are fees that are mandatory but not transparently disclosed to consumers,” for example. Yet airline baggage fees are not mandatory. Nor overdraft fees. Nor credit card late fees. Nor even early termination fees. They are either payments for services or fees charged for breach of contract.

  It would clearly be more accurate to say that “junk fees” as weaponized by the White House are any fees the administration identifies some customers might dislike or find annoying. That means this war on prices is likely to create substantial uncertainty for a raft of businesses in the future.

  In addition: the policies are "often explicitly contradictory" and the administration "remains highly economical with the truth" about the costs to the consumer of those fees.

• And then? Jim Geraghty notes that Donald Trump’s Plan on Ukraine Is to Just Let Russia Win. Which is not great, but what I want to quote is a bit further down in the column, where Orange Man was asked by CNBC interviewer Joe Kernan, "Have you changed your, your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President? Seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be stuck at 120% of debt to GDP forever."

  And Trump's answer was…

  So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak. And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is 50%. They say 32 and 33%. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50%, that means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50% more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy. When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil but we were going at a much higher level oil and gas. We were doing, you know, we were third when I started and when they ended we were one by a longshot and we were very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi Arabia and Russia were doing. And we were on that path. We were gonna be paying down debt. We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with Covid. I guess China found that out because they also really got hit very hard also, but nobody wins with Covid. And so we had to get to we had to do other things. We had to help. You know, if I didn’t do the expenditures that we didn’t do the kinds of things we did for the economy, we would add in 1929 type depression. And I had to say out in front of it, and we did we did a great job on that and we did with all of the things we’re coming up with Regeneron doing so much else, getting all because you know we had empty when I came in, we had empty, I call them empty cupboards. We had empty shelves, we didn’t have equipment, we didn’t have the gowns, we didn’t have the ventilators. We didn’t have anything. This country wasn’t prepared for a thing like that. And I’m not even blaming anybody in that. Because, you know, when when it came, nobody thought the pandemic would ever happen again. It sounds like an ancient’s problem, not a problem that you’d have you know at that time, you know, in modern, very modern age. It was like an ancient thing. We you know, who, who would ever show I’m not blaming anybody, but we had empty cupboards, and I got them stocked and I got them stocked fast. And we did a great job with it. Never got credit. I got credit for the greatest economy. I got credit for foreign policy. I got credit for knocking out ISIS and not going into wars. But we beat ISIS, but I never got the credit for having done a great job with that.

  Geraghty's commentary: "That’s the Republican nominee. Great call, everybody."

• I'll try not to stand too close, but I'm standing pretty close… to Arnold Kling, who posts on a topic dear to my heart: Where I stand on libertarianism. He outlines five issues on which he agrees with what he perceives as the libertarian consensus, and five where he disagrees. Example of the latter:

  I do not agree with total passivity in foreign policy, and I do not agree with libertarians who take the progressive view that America and Israel are bad actors. I do take a libertarian view that nation-building is way outside the competence of government. But I don’t like watching the Houthis sink ships. We should protect freedom of the seas, and if that means killing a lot of Houthis, so be it. I also trust the average American’s instinct about who is right and wrong in the world more than I trust “elite opinion.”

  Not that you should care, but my lists are slightly different (and I reserve the right to change my mind on it): I'm in libertarian agreement on school choice, free trade, small government, deregulation, drug legalization. Disagree on isolationist foreign policy, abortion, "open borders", privatizing security, taking order for granted.