We resurrect (once more) Newsweek's cover from November 19, 1973. I'm old enough to remember getting that issue in the mail. And young enough to recall my reaction: what did you expect to happen with price controls?
We could all stand a reminder, though, and Peter Suderman provides one: Everybody Hates Prices. He begins by examining one example of "everybody", unfortunately in a position of power:
The Wendy's Baconator is a beast of a burger. Introduced in 2007 as part of a back-to-basics rebranding of the perpetual fast-food underdog, the Baconator consists of a half-pound of beef, multiple slices of gooey American cheese, and six pieces of bacon, plus condiments. It contains 57 grams of protein and just shy of a thousand calories—about half the daily recommended intake for an average person, and more than twice the average caloric intake of the estimated 800 million people globally who are perpetually undernourished.
How much would you pay for a miracle food like the Baconator? How much should you pay? Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has some ideas.
In February, Wendy's CEO Kirk Tanner announced the burger chain would invest $20 million in digital menus. These virtual menu screens would allow the company to experiment with dynamic pricing—which is to say, pricing that changes regularly based on circumstances.
Tanner's announcement led to news stories saying the company planned to test out "surge pricing," a strategy most commonly associated with ride-sharing companies whose prices rise with demand. Try hailing an Uber at rush hour, or after a big game in a downtown area, and you'll pay more than you would for the same ride on a quiet weekday afternoon. Wendy's, the stories suggested, might be planning to charge more for its meals during lunch and dinner rush hours.
Warren wasn't having it.
On X, she wrote that the move meant "you could pay more for your lunch, even if the cost to Wendy's stays exactly the same." That would not be acceptable. "It's price gouging plain and simple," she wrote, "and American families have had enough."
One is tempted to respond, "Senator, this is a Wendy's."
Great. Now I'm hungry. The Baconator is $8.19 at my local Wendy's, Liz.
Suderman's article is a fine discussion of the malady of governments trying to coerce sellers and buyers of products and services to transact at some price they would otherwise not both freely agree to. His bottom line:
This is why it's foolish to hate prices, and why they provide so much value—not only to businesses, but to consumers. Prices don't just provide the information that you can't have everything you want. They help you understand how to get what you want. Prices help people prioritize, manage, and allocate scarce resources, at home and in the boardroom. They are tools for making better decisions.
Despite Elizabeth Warren's protestations, there's no single right price for a hamburger. Nor is there a single correct price for housing, or health care, or eggs, or gasoline, or checked bags, or neighboring airline seats. Prices are just an information delivery system, the messenger that politicians keep wanting to shoot.
Also of note:
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This article could have been longer. Tal Fortgang kept it manageable, though: The Shamelessness of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He notes Coates' latest effort, The Message, in which he opines on Hamas and Israel, a topic on which he holds simplistic and foolish views. But:
Shamelessness is one thread running through Coates’s short but eventful stint as the darling oracle of race-obsessed Americans. It did not begin with The Message. There’s a shamelessness to insisting with a straight face that white Americans are engaged in an ongoing race war against black Americans when the most basic facts that might prove such a claim actually point the other direction. (There is no race war, which you could have figured out by the amount of time Coates spends mind-reading in Between the World and Me, for which he won several awards.) There’s a similar shamelessness to hearing Dokoupil point out that Coates’s book about a region has completely ignored the eliminationism animating one side of a conflict and responding, yeah, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Yeah. I'm reading Christopher Cox's biography of Woodrow Wilson, which contains vivid descriptions of American race warfare. We ain't doing that any more.
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Shoulda, coulda, woulda. Ann Althouse looks at a WaPo article that contains:
In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter, according to people familiar with his comments.
Ann observes:
But look how clearly the article states that Biden intended to use the Justice Department to destroy his political adversary!
Too true. But that charge that Garland was "aggressive" in going after Hunter Biden shouldn't go unchallenged. Note that Hunter's pardon goes all the way back to anything he might have done on or after January 1, 2014. Andy McCarthy notes:
The breathtaking expanse of Hunter’s pardon – nearly 11 years for someone the president repeatedly told us had done nothing wrong – is clearly an effort to foreclose any further investigation of the president’s son over the 2014-16 period from which the Biden Justice Department quite intentionally averted its eyes.
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On the LFOD watch. The Valley News editorializes. Wanted: A state librarian who’s eager to ban books.
“The Live Free or Die state seeks a strong leader who is truly passionate about banning books and censoring other library materials. Reporting to the wing-nut caucus of the Legislature and Executive Council, the successful candidate will be responsible for creating and maintaining an updated list of proscribed materials for the state’s 234 public libraries, including but not limited to those that address gender, sexuality and race in a way that contravenes evangelical Christian and Roman Catholic doctrine or the views of any individual parent. Send resume and censorship samples to Gov.-Elect Kelly Ayotte, state of New Hampshire.”
Welcome to the Granite State, where reality so often gives hyperbole a run for its money. Earlier this month on his way out the door, Gov. Chris Sununu withdrew his nomination of the well-qualified Mindy Atwood to be state librarian in the face of objections by conservative activists and some members of the Executive Council. Their opposition — you couldn’t make this up — was centered on Atwood’s advocacy against book censorship. Thus the fanciful job description posted above.
Heh. Well, this is pretty standard stuff. It boils down to "Trust the librarians to decide what books to make available to your kiddos." Parents who might not want their children to be able to pick up a copy of Gender Queer should … I don't know, run for their library's Board of Trustees?
Apparently this was a successful effort by RebuildNH, a conservative activist group who argued:
Mindy Atwood has a history of promoting progressive library policies, including preventing school boards from removing pornographic materials. This nominee will use her position as State Librarian to continue her political advocacy efforts and undermine parents and school boards.
They could have had a point, although I'd like to see the evidence. New Hampshire
CommiePublic Radio has a story about the imbroglio, slanted as you would expect, but you can dig some facts out of it.
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Losing their religion. Building on a story we found hilarious a couple days ago, Jerry Coyne has resigned from his position on the "Honorary Board" of the "Freedom From Religion Foundation"; their management took down a blog post he made on their site, which defended the notion that sex is biologically binary, a rebuttal to an essay from Kat Grant ("What is a woman?") which argued otherwise.
Also resigning from the Honorary Board are Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. From the Pinker link above, Jerry excerpts Steven's (correct) observation:
With this action, the Foundation is no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics. It has turned its back on reason: if your readers “wrongfully perceive” the opposite of a clear statement that you support the expression of contesting opinions, the appropriate response is to stand by your statement, not ratify their error. It has turned the names Freethought Today and Freethought Now into sad jokes, inviting ridicule from its worse foes. And it has shown contempt for the reasoned advice of its own board members.
Small correction: it's not only inviting "ridicule from its worse foes", but also ridicule from people like me, who don't think about it much at all.