Read it.

A good sign. Wish I’d done that myself.

Ammo Grrrl lays it down.

In the early days of The Movement, it would be generally agreed that Black Women had it pretty rough. But then ideological camps would form on who was more oppressed Black Men or White Women? The political arguments were fierce, if patently ridiculous.

Most of the people involved in these discussions were trust-fund wastrels, Red Diaper Babies (people whose own parents were Communists), limousine liberal professors, and work-averse idiots in their 20s (self-described “community organizers”) who had never been “oppressed” for even a day in their lives. But becoming part of a Protected Class turned out to be very lucrative. Why, you could become a Harvard Law professor just with imaginary high cheekbones in your round fat pale face!

Then new categories of victims were added, seemingly daily. What about a gay Black man versus a disabled Hispanic woman? What weight to give what alleged obstacle? Transgendered was far in the future. And now that glorious future has arrived!

Read it.

States, though, have struggled to maintain supplies of the most commonly used drugs — or find suitable alternatives — as more suppliers have refused to let their drugs be used in executions. Recent executions that took much longer than planned have brought more scrutiny around the method. In January, months after Oklahoma bungled the execution of Clayton Lockett, the U.S. Supreme Court said it would examine Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol.

Fine. Let’s go back to hanging, a perfectly sensible solution that requires common materials.

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What may be most baffling of all is the simple fact that this is not a green policy. At first glance you might believe it to be, with renewable right there in the title and the prefix “bio-” so often appended to descriptions of this corn-based fuel, but studies have shown the kinds of fuel being produced by the RFS are anything but green.

This is a policy mess that dates back to the Bush Administration, though it is one the current President was more than happy to continue in order to enhance his green credentials. It’s clear that it has failed, by any metric. Bills to repeal and reform the RFS are working their way through Congress at the moment; we’ll be watching their progress in the hopes that we can find a way to end this biofuel boondoggle.

Read it.

That’s why nobody takes seriously Lindsay Graham, who appears to be striving to be the Joe Biden of the Republican establishment.

Read it.

Let us celebrate that rare bird, a bureaucrat with a clue.

A panel of nutrition experts generated controversy last month when it pressed the federal government to consider the environment when issuing new dietary guidelines later this year. Generally speaking, that would mean asking Americans to eat less meat and more plant-based foods.

Ever since then, the question has been whether the agencies developing the recommendations – the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services – would take up the suggestion and weigh the impact of food on air and water quality, among other issues.

“I read the actual law,” Mr. Vilsack said. “And what I read …was that our job ultimately is to formulate dietary and nutrition guidelines. And I emphasize dietary and nutrition because that’s what the law says. I think it’s my responsibility to follow the law.”

Unlike his boss….

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On March 3, 2015, Religion News Service online carried two stories next to each other, both dealing with judicial measures against apostasy, though under greatly different circumstances. Dictionary definitions of apostasy (from the Greek apostasis/”departure” or “defection”) differ depending on cultural context, but there is a simple meaning, very close to how the term is used in the vernacular today: an abandonment or renunciation of a religious or political faith to which an individual is supposed to adhere. In the first RNS  story the judicial process was initiated by an Islamic court in Saudi Arabia, in the second story by the authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as Mormons), whose headquarters are in Utah. The urge to connect these two dots is irresistible (at least to me).

Hint: Mormons don’t kill people for apostasy.

Read it.

Yesterday the president of the University of Oklahoma (OU) expelled two students who had been caught on camera leading a bus full of their fraternity brothers in disgustingly racist song. Despite agreement from all corners that their behavior was worthy of condemnation, legal experts and First Amendment advocates quickly pointed out that, well, um, kicking students out of a public college for something they said almost definitely violates the Constitution.

“The university president wrote that the students are being expelled for ‘your leadership role in leading a racist and exclusionary chant which has created a hostile educational environment for others,'” wrote the law professor Eugene Volokh on his blog at The Washington Post. “But there is no First Amendment exception for racist speech, or exclusionary speech, or…for speech by university students that has created a hostile educational environment for others.”

As my colleague Robby Soave put it, “You can’t expel students at a public university for their words. It’s that simple.”

Third World Problem.

The issue of Gulf royals coming to Pakistan to hunt with falcons is becoming increasingly controversial.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

It is none of Obama’s business, either as an individual or as President, what rights students have with regard to financial aid.

The original Bill of Rights delineated areas in which individuals were protected from government, not areas in which government got to mandate that they get Free Stuff.

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Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama (Um, um, um).

Read it.

Apple Stores’ ability to generate a high rate of foot traffic in malls is allowing Apple to win “sweetheart deals” from mall operators while increasing mall sales 10%, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.

…

Because Apple Stores bring in so much traffic that leads to increased sales in other parts of the mall, Apple has been able to win rental agreements that see it paying as little as 2% of its sales a square foot. Typically, rents paid to mall operators are based on how much the retailer expects to sell, which is influenced by overall mall traffic.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

We hear a lot these days about how we must reduce the number of black men in prison. Here is a reform that I think would reduce the number of black men thrown into prison for extra-long terms by judges and juries: don’t let megalomaniacal black guys with two digit IQs and poor spelling fire their court-appointed attorneys and represent themselves, because they often wind up getting longer terms from annoyed juries and judges.

My idea for a reform to reduce the number of black men in prison is for black men to quit committing so many crimes. But that’s me.

My wife was on a jury once in the trial of an “aspiring rapper” for welfare fraud for collecting welfare for his children while they lived with his parents. But he appeared to be spending most of the welfare checks on his kids, and he didn’t have any history of violence (he seemed more histrionic than thuggish, and if he didn’t have a couple of kids you’d probably guess he was gay), so an adept attorney probably could have plea-bargained him off with a light sentence.

However, craving his moment in the spotlight, the defendant had fired his court-appointed attorney and conducted his entire defense himself, which prominently featured cross-examining his mother over various grievances he had with her going back to childhood. The judge kept trying to remind the defendant that the jury was there to determine his guilt or innocence, not to render judgment on his mother.

The jury was outraged over having to sit through this sub-reality TV for a week and a half and wanted to instantly return a verdict that the defendant should be sentenced to about life plus 500 years.

My wife made her fellow jurors laboriously go through each charge in detail. And sure enough, he was guilty as sin, although the jury probably would have let him off on some of the counts if he had had a professional attorney. Thus, he’ll be in jail longer because he chose to represent himself.

So, if you want to reduce extremely long sentences and prison overcrowding, don’t let egomaniacal black criminals fire their court-appointed attorneys.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

More than 4,000 people availed of the government’s employment-verification system using Social Security numbers belonging to people over the age of 112. Trouble is fewer than 40 people are known to have reached that age. That’s one of the revelations from a review by the watchdog for the Social Security Administration.

Don’t you just love that term ‘watchdog’? You will notice that this alleged ‘watchdog’ is never identified in the article. After all, why do that? It’s a watchdog. We all know what watchdogs do! We’re NPR, a Voice of the Crust! You can trust us!

The review also said there were approximately 6.5 million Social Security numbers linked to people 112 years of age or older. The reason, the review said: “SSA did not have controls in place to annotate death information on the … records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies and were likely deceased.”

You would think that the Social Security Administration would have basic checks in place to make sure that their money (i.e. your money) is going to real people who qualify for it. But you would be wrong.

Read it.

Well, there’s a surprise: The New York Times coming out against a government subsidy that chiefly benefits people who don’t read the New York Times. Stop the presses….

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Say goodbye to the family farm, unless the family is named Kennedy or Clinton.

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A DH-10 land attack cruise missile (LACM) launches out of its canister, heading for parts unknown. Weighing about 1-1.5 tons (about the same size as the American Tomahawk cruise missile), it can be launched from land on a three missile transport erector launch (TEL) vehicle, as shown here. Shortly after ejection from the canister, the DH-10’s two retractable wings, four tailfins and belly mounted engine air intake will all unfold as it flies as far as 2,500km away. Reportedly able to hit a garage door sized target, In addition to carrying a 500kg high explosive warhead toward a target with accuracy the DH-10’s payload can either be a 500kg high explosive warhead or submunitions for attacking fighters on runways and tank columns, nuclear warheads and fuel air explosives. Notably, DH-10s use several guidance modes, including satellite navigation, inertial navigation, and terrain following, making it hard to jam or deceive.

Just sayin’.

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Young made the comment during a House Natural Resources Committee hearing during an exchange with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. He was arguing that gray wolves should be taken off the endangered species list, criticizing the National Park Service and his congressional colleagues who seek to protect the animals.

“How many of you have got wolves in your district? None. None. Not one,” Young said, calling the gray wolf “a predator.”

“We’ve got 79 congressmen sending you a letter, they haven’t got a damn wolf in their whole district,” Young added. “I’d like to introduce them in your district. If I introduced them in your district, you wouldn’t have a homeless problem anymore.”

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

Read it.

Bard’s latest book is a well-written overview of the history of the Middle East, Islam, and the Jews since the early twentieth century. The author chooses this beginning point largely because it roughly coincides with the reemergence of a flourishing Jewish presence in the Middle East. The work also covers the creation of current Arab states by European powers as well as conflicts within the Muslim world, especially, though not exclusively, the Sunni-Shiite rivalry. Bard includes secular anti-Semitic terror groups in his study and reminds us of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s terror activities since the late 1960s.

Read it.

In rural America, where there are more guns, fewer people, and fewer doctors than in the urban U.S., young people are at particular risk of suicide.

Whereas in big city slums, where there are a lot more people, a lot more doctors, and just as many guns (just not legal ones), young people are particularly at risk of homicide. But that’s not part of the Crustian Narrative, so you won’t find any mention of it in the Atlantic.

“Suicide is in many ways the oft-ignored part of gun tragedy in America, the part that few talk about, especially those who resist any efforts to decrease access to guns,” writes Frederick Rivara, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington, in an editorial accompanying the study. He points out that 86 percent of suicide attempts using guns end in death, compared to 2 percent of attempts using drugs.

Don’t you just love that phrase, ‘gun tragedy in America’? I guess a gun is like the One Ring of Power, inevitably corrupting anyone who falls within it’s baleful influence. Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the government is rapidly making the Land of Opportunity into the Land of Poverty and Dependency, oh no….

Read it.

I remember having to make six copies of a form using carbon paper. I love photocopiers.

Nowadays, of course, we just scan stuff.

Read it.

It was only in 2012 that Doudna, Charpentier and their colleagues offered the first demonstration of CRISPR’s potential. They crafted molecules that could enter a microbe and precisely snip its DNA at a location of the researchers’ choosing. In January 2013, the scientists went one step further: They cut out a particular piece of DNA in human cells and replaced it with another one.

In the same month, separate teams of scientists at Harvard University and the Broad Institute reported similar success with the gene-editing tool. A scientific stampede commenced, and in just the past two years, researchers have performed hundreds of experiments on CRISPR. Their results hint that the technique may fundamentally change both medicine and agriculture.

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Just about every cell in a human body has the same DNA, packaged into the same chromosomes. But cells differentiate, growing into different tissue types with different functions. The epigenome works through molecules like methyl and acetyl groups that wheedle their way into DNA, exposing different genes to the machinery that reads them and makes proteins. That helps control when or whether those proteins get made at all, and it’s also critical to that process of differentiation. “In each cell type, it unravels just the right genes,” says Brad Bernstein, a biologist at Harvard University. “It unravels just the right switches.

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A recent experiment by a team from Israel scores points against this position. Ran Hassin and colleagues used a neat visual trick called Continuous Flash Suppression to put information into participants’ minds without them becoming consciously aware of it. It might sound painful, but in reality it’s actually quite simple. The technique takes advantage of the fact that we have two eyes and our brain usually attempts to fuse the two resulting images into a single coherent view of the world. Continuous Flash Suppression uses light-bending glasses to show people different images in each eye. One eye gets a rapid succession of brightly coloured squares which are so distracting that when genuine information is presented to the other eye, the person is not immediately consciously aware of it. In fact, it can take several seconds for something that is in theory perfectly visible to reach awareness (unless you close one eye to cut out the flashing squares, then you can see the ‘suppressed’ image immediately).

Doesn’t surprise me.

Richard Fernandez points out some inconvenient truth.

The United States was founded by men well acquainted with greatest power of the age: Britain.  The Founders were not ignorant of efficiencies of parliamentary government. The British Army came perilously close to getting them “done”. Rather they both respected and feared it.

The instrument of government they created to replace the Crown was calculated to both exercise power and protect its citizens from that power.  What they did not provide was an adequate mechanism for resolving fundamental differences of principle within the mechanism of government.  As the Lincoln-Douglas debates suggested, that had to be fixed by other means. Once “a house is divided” gridlock ensued; and there is no remedy until the house was united again.  The Constitution seems designed to force the body politic to reach a consensus externally before it would allow the wheels to turn again. The Amendments are peace treaties marking the resolution of various crises.

Permanently resolving the crisis in favor of single body may not be a “better system”. The crises themselves cannot be finessed. They will fester until they are fundamentally resolved. Examples of this abound. Only today the White House and Democratic lawmakers expressed indignation at a letter sent by 47 GOP lawmakers to Iran reminding the Ayatollahs that the government of the United States consisted of more than one man.

Yeah … the nerve!

Read it.

Sadly, efforts to protect farmlands in Hawai’i are something of a joke considering that Hawai’i’s land-use laws–the strictest in the nation–were supposedly passed to protect farmlands and yet in fact are responsible for destroying Hawai’i’s agricultural industry. The land-use laws made Hawai’ian housing so unaffordable that farmers can’t pay workers enough for them to be able to live there. As a result, the state has lost most of its pineapple, sugar cane, and other crop production to other Pacific islands such as Fiji.

As soon as the government gets involved, things go to shit. Oh, wait, isn’t Obama from Hawaii? Well–there it is.

Read it.

Not the sort of thing one is accustomed to seeing in National Geographic.

Soon to be a major motion picture, I have no doubt.

Watch it. Feel free to laugh.

Primarily, that’s because Lindsey Graham doesn’t have anything to say that anybody else wants to read. So it’s not really his fault.

Watch it. (Ignore the first one, with the commercial. Page down for the real thing.) Oh, and read the article.

Read it.

How do we fight back against cops and child protection workers who think parents that let their kids walk outside are negligent?

By flooding the streets with kids.

Busybodies who dial 911 the instant they see an unsupervised child are not going to do that when they pass a park filled with 15 kids. (Well, most aren’t.)  And when masses of moppets take to the sidewalks after school, no one is going to call the cops to report, “Tons of children are walking home!”

Works for me.

Read it.

Absolute belief renders ISIS’ atrocities not only explicable but seemingly almost mandatory. After all, if you hold the keys to the perfection of life on Earth, then anyone who stands in your way is actively depriving everyone else of that outcome and thereby ensuring the continued suffering of millions. Eliminating such people therefore serves the good of all mankind. (And the grisly beheadings, crucifixions, immolations? They can be justified on the same grounds as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were: They will shock and awe the enemy into an earlier surrender, and thus save lives in the end. Mercy becomes a justification for cruelty.)

None of this is new. A century ago another Utopian movement behaved very much the same.

The communist revolution led by Vladimir Lenin committed a reign of terror just as heinous and unbridled as the Islamic State’s. The Cheka—a secret state police force created by Lenin and a precursor of the KGB—was tasked with liquidating all those suspected of opposition, including clergy, the children of military officers and the well-to-do. It butchered thousands of innocents and inflicted ghastly tortures, from skinning victims alive to tying them to boards and pushing them slowly into furnaces.

Such savagery was not an aberration; it was policy. “Freedom is a bourgeois prejudice,” Lenin declared.

Islam is really just an older and more successful model. Bother are oppressive totalitarian ideologies with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

Written by a man, of course.

Jim Goad points & laughs.

Although it was released over three years ago, there were audible sounds of indigestion online recently at the discovery of a textbook called Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education. The book is intended for all students of high school age and above. From a cursory glance of the book’s advertising materials, it appears to be roughly as full of shit as its title would imply.

…

But sensible citizens such as you and I realize that the voodoo term “racism” is purely a social construct and thus has no innate meaning. That’s why different groups are always fighting one another to define it. The ability to define words is the root of cultural power. In my lifetime, the word’s definition has expanded with the ravenousness of a malignant tumor. Nowadays, everything white is racist. Even pointing that out is racist. And it’s racist of me for making fun of the fact that pointing this out is racist. And every word I keep saying from hereon out merely compounds the racism.

Read it.

The Main Event: Texas vs. California

Today’s two leading economic models come, not surprisingly, from our two megastates, California and Texas.

…

The difference in domestic migration is particularly revealing. Since 2010, Texas has gained over a half million migrants, while California lost 200,000 residents. The Lone Star State has taken over California’s historic role as the primary destination for middle- and working-class people looking to start a new life; the Golden State’s growth now stems from immigration and inertia – from among all the families formed after decades of rapid population growth.

These differences reflect policy choices. California, one can say, charitably, is looking for “quality” growth that touches the environment very lightly and creates high-end jobs, along with many lower-end service positions. Yet many aspects of state policy – the drive for renewables, stricter land-use regulations and expanding the welfare state – makes the Golden State the national model for progressives, even as middle-class and working-class people head for the exits.

Steve Sailer runs the numbers.

Read it.

Like millions of other Americans who have slogged through an uncomfortably cold winter, I’m looking forward to the change of season. But Daylight Saving Time is an annual tradition whose time has passed. In contemporary society, it’s not only unnecessary: It’s also wasteful, cruel, and dangerous. And it’s long past time to bid it goodbye.

Further: 5 myths about daylight saving time

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Of course, this comes as no surprise to people who have no difficulty remembering that the government approach to any activity leads to the Post Office more often than not.

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Setty is paraphrasing Minnesota planner Charles Marohn who argues that transportation planners need to change the emphasis from increasing people’s mobility to reducing the amount we “force them to drive.” This is hardly new: the notion that some mysterious conspiracy has forced Americans to drive has underlain a lot of urban planning for the past several decades. It is pure baloney.

No one forced automobiles on Americans. Instead, automobiles liberated Americans. Not counting the war years, transit ridership peaked in 1926 at an average of just 147 trips per year. Close to half of all Americans lacked any access to transit, and even many who lived near transit lines couldn’t afford to use them very often. Most of those who couldn’t ride transit were limited to foot travel. At an average trip length of 5 miles, transit travel was less than 750 miles a year.

Crustian mythology accepted as fact by our ruling class are at the root of much of the bad policy that finds its way into our lives.

Americans in the 1920s could see the huge advantages provided by cars. When an Indiana woman was asked why her family bought a car when their home still lacked indoor plumbing, she answered, “you can’t go to town in a bathtub.”

Indeed. For somebody who wants to work for a living, a car is right behind some place to live in the priority of needs.

When Marohn says we should stop forcing Americans to drive, he means we should design urban areas to allow people to use transit, walk, or bicycle more: in other words, higher densities, mixed uses. But there’s a good reason why urban areas are designed the way they are: people prefer the privacy and lack of noise (not to mention lower land prices) that come with low densities and separated uses. Certainly, there may be a limited market for high-density, mixed-use developments, but if there is, let developers build for the market. Don’t try to impose it based on the idea that doing so will lead people to drive less.

The problem with ‘urban planners’ is that they think it appropriate to force other people to live in the way the planners thing appropriate — something that those very same planners would denounce as fascism if it were applied to themselves.

Read it.

Yesterday President Obama spoke at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in observation of the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery marches. The White House has posted the text of Obama’s speech here and the video below. I encourage interested readers to check out the text or the video for themselves.

Assuming you have a strong stomach.

President Obama began by paying tribute to Rep. John Lewis, whom he identified as “one of [his] heroes.” Lewis is his hero for more than one reason. In 1965 Lewis was part of the march across the bridge; today he is a ranking Democratic hack protecting the lawlessness of the Obama administration. In Lewis we can trace the fate of the civil rights movement over the past 50 years.

It is with the Civil Rights movement of the 60s that we started the long slow painful slide down the razor blade of Victis Triumphantes, whereby who ever gets to play the role of victim automatically wins any argument, dispute, or pot o’ money that is available.

Steve Hayward remarks on the latest by the architect of the Obamacare exchanges fiasco.

Certainly Gruber’s suggestion of taxation of body weight to solve the ‘obesity epidemic’ is ludicrous, but it illustrates the way statists thing: Every problem that the intellectual clerisy thinks is a problem is properly a subject for government action, and taxation is not just a means for getting necssary government revenue but a tool of social manipulation to coerce the Great Stupidity of the Unenlightened to do things The Right Way.

People who express such proclivities ought to be debarred from government service.

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This is a fun read, but the really interesting bit is this one:

In the intervening years it’s become progressively harder to get an H1-b and start the process. From what I hear they are basically snapped up in advance by the big outsourcing firms. The flip-side to that is that once you have one then transferring between employers needn’t be the nightmare it was a decade ago – assuming that your original employer plays ball. If they don’t then it’s indentured servitude. Which is why the outsourcers love them (as do their clients – the “lack of technically skilled people” is largely a myth. What there is a lack of is people willing to work for the pittance that some of the temps will take). [emphasis added]

Yet more evidence is that the push for expanded immigration is driven mainly by employers wanting cheap labor, not by high-minded worship of America’s position as a home for the people that other nations don’t want.

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The Council of Europe is very unhappy that the French government won’t ban spanking. The BBC reports on a new non-binding ruling by the Council’s European Committee of Social Rights finding that France’s corporal punishment laws were “not sufficiently clear, binding and specific.” The French government was unimpressed.

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Over the years, we have been struck repeatedly by how often President Obama is wrong. Not how often we disagree with him, but how often he is just plain wrong, on matters of history, science and so on. Obama has a blithe willingness to assert false propositions of fact, apparently without fear of correction. I suppose that is because the Democratic press has little incentive to point out his errors.

Hey … he won.

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Despite appearances, China’s political system is badly broken, and nobody knows it better than the Communist Party itself. China’s strongman leader, Xi Jinping , is hoping that a crackdown on dissent and corruption will shore up the party’s rule. He is determined to avoid becoming the Mikhail Gorbachev of China, presiding over the party’s collapse. But instead of being the antithesis of Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Xi may well wind up having the same effect. His despotism is severely stressing China’s system and society—and bringing it closer to a breaking point.

Predicting the demise of authoritarian regimes is a risky business. Few Western experts forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union before it occurred in 1991; the CIA missed it entirely. The downfall of Eastern Europe’s communist states two years earlier was similarly scorned as the wishful thinking of anticommunists—until it happened. The post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, as well as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, all burst forth unanticipated.

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Apple Watch uses a mini version of Passbook to hold your credit and debit card info for payments. When you want to buy something at a cash register, you just need to double click the button beneath the “Digital Crown” and hold it up to the contactless payment system. Apple is using “Device Account Numbers” for each of your cards, which means that your actual card number isn’t transferred to the merchant. There’s also a “transaction-specific dynamic security code” to help keep your payment info secure and prevent hackers from skimming your account number and using it for another purchase. After a successful payment, the watch will vibrate and make a small beep.

This almost makes me want to get one. Almost.

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The shift means more restrictions on moneymaking ventures and loss of ownership. But nonprofit schools — defined as providing a public benefit — do not have to pay taxes, are eligible for certain state grants and can receive more money from the federal student loan program.

It’s all about government money — what it gives, and what it takes.

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The famished Kurdish mother had gone to plead with the jihadists to release her son.

Cruel militants delayed talks with the elderly mum – feeding her a meal made with the corpse of her offspring while she waited.

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BABY Ellie Cross was born free of a genetic disease which could have claimed her life, thanks to a pioneering technique.

Her mother, Jess Fenwick, had a 50 per cent chance of passing on neurofibromatosis.

The condition causes tumours to grow along nerve endings.

Over time these can become cancerous and threaten the life of sufferers.

To prevent her much-wanted baby inheriting the disease, Jess underwent embryo selection, or pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD).

Doctors found an embryo free from the faulty gene, fertilised it with sperm from Jess’s partner Paul Cross, 39, then implanted it in her womb.

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Suppose a doctor told a two-pack-a-day smoker not to worry about his tobacco addiction because smoking another half-pack per day would shorten his life expectancy by only six weeks. What would you think of that physician? The physician may have been telling the literal truth; the additional damage done to the health and life expectancy of smoking an additional 10 cigarettes per day on top of the 40 (two packs) already consumed is relatively small.

But this ignores well-documented evidence that consuming two packs per day reduces life expectancies by more than 10 years. Any doctor focusing solely on the additional (marginal) negative impact of smoking could be accused of incompetence and medical malpractice. Yet this is precisely what economists do whenever they assess the damage done by minimum-wage legislation. Their analysis focuses on the additional harm done by an increase in legislated wages; it completely ignores the impact that existing minimum wages impose upon society’s most vulnerable.

And what might that be?

Economic analysis focuses almost exclusively upon what will happen to unemployment with an increase in the minimum wages; ignored is the harm that current levels create. Minimum wages deprive the mentally and physically disabled, the least skilled, least educated and most inexperienced workers a chance to compete with more able, skilled, educated and experienced workers for jobs by working for lower wages.

The “low” wages the disadvantaged are paid do not reflect the dollar value of the additional training, skills, education and experience they receive. Focusing solely on money wages obscures economic reality; the disadvantaged receive both money and additional human capital that only comes from being employed.

Benefits that don’t come from being on the government dole. But of course having more people depending on Free Stuff From The Government is the whole point of the exercise, all the sentimentalist bloviation notwithstanding.