Pun Salad

Illustrated by Mr. Ramirez:

The further story, if you need it: Massachusetts Law Legalizes Abortion Throughout Pregnancy

Google assures me that infanticide is still illegal in Massachusetts, prosecutable as a homicide or manslaughter. Apparently the Massachusetts government (and probably a good fraction of the citizenry) believes that the event of "birth" is a bit of biological magic that transforms a legal "medical procedure" into a heinous crime.

Also of note:

• An interesting solution. Jeffrey Miron suggests an endgame: Let the Social Security Trust Fund Go to Zero.

  Congress has three ways to restore Trust Fund solvency: increase SS taxes, cut SS benefits, or transfer non-SS revenues. Any of these would require amending current law. Congress presumably has no appetite for such policies, since they would be wildly unpopular across the political spectrum.

  […]

  To be sure, the specific benefit cut that will occur if Congress does nothing is probably not the ideal. A better approach might exempt those already receiving benefits, and phase in the cuts over time. The ideal cut would also increase the age of eligibility (again, over time).

  Thus, in a perfect world, Congress would enact a substantial but compassionate cut in benefits. Yet this seems unlikely. The good news is that doing nothing – letting the 22 percent reduction in scheduled OASI benefits happen – is roughly in the right direction.

  Let me introduce, once again, my lovely backup singer, Jane Wickline:

  I really suspect Congress will go for one of the worse alternatives, though.

• Prices convey information. But some don't want you to get that information. The WaPo editorialists aren't having it: Better to fear price controls than ‘dynamic pricing’. (WaPo gifted link)

  “We should all be worried about ‘dynamic pricing,’” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) announced online this week. That would be a waste of Americans’ collective anxiety.

  Warren said dynamic pricing is “when companies change their prices in real time,” but that’s hardly a helpful definition. What counts as “in real time”? It isn’t that prices should be set once and forever frozen (like the ice cream she cited), or that consumers would be better off if bureaucrats get to decide how often a price is allowed to change.

  Businesses use all sorts of time-based factors for pricing. Air travel usually costs more when booked the day before a flight than when booked months in advance. Restaurants have promotions, such as lunch specials or happy hours, with prices changing based on the time of day (though happy hours are banned in Warren’s home state — something Massachusetts legislators are trying to change with a “fun agenda”). Finding yourself on the wrong side of price changes can be annoying, of course, but price controls would create much greater annoyances.

  Wouldn't it be nice if Senators were concerned with making the cost of government go down?

• 

  They've gone to graveyards every one. At the Daily Economy Nikolai G. Wenzel wonders: Where Have All the Conservatives Gone?

  Fusionism, a new book by Stephanie Slade, a Senior Editor at Reason, attempts to make sense of the seemingly incoherent New Right. Although Slade proposes a renewal of fusionism as a remedy to conservatism’s drift and the challenges facing a divided Republic, the book’s greatest strength lies in its analysis of the trends to date.

  The Republican Party, for all its faults, was supposed to understand (instinctively, if not always intellectually) limited government, rule of law, and the basics of economics. From its elected leaders, though, we have gotten tariffs, increased public debt, dodgy respect for habeas corpus in immigration enforcement, and the Saturday Night Live tragicomedy of DOGE (a virtue-signaling, clumsy, and cruel flash in the pan destined to die on the vine when it removed entitlements from the chopping block). The coalition that constitutes the New Right has abandoned conservatism, and instead sells its own form of populist interventionism.

  Amazon tells me my copy of Fusionism will arrive on September 1. Looking forward to it. (Amazon link at your right.)

• I, for one, want to see Amazon drone me. But not everyone's a fan. Christian Britschgi notes the conflict we could have expected: Unionized delivery drivers vs. deliveries.

  One would think that delivery drivers would be natural supporters of delivery services. Not if you're the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

  Through lobbying efforts and lawsuits, the union has made itself the primary enemy of any business or industry that might ship goods or drop off packages without employing unionized drivers (or any drivers, for that matter).

  The Teamsters have come out in force to support New York City's Delivery Protection Act (DPA), which would require companies like Amazon to hire delivery drivers as full-time employees—an effective ban on the company's current practice of hiring out deliveries to smaller subcontracting firms.

  I would guess that Democrats crying loudest about "affordability" are silent about union efforts to pump up companies' delivery costs.

• Indispensible. I quoted Jim Geraghty, five years ago, about Wheezy Joe:

  Something is wrong with President Biden, and we are all being asked to pretend we don’t notice.

  Note that this was about three years before the "respectable" media reluctantly came to the same conclusion, and it became OK to "notice".

  Jim was also an early proponent of the lab leak hypothesis.

Recently on the book blog: