Government getting in the way of employment

Jeff Jacoby has a great column on the ludicrous way in which government sets limits on how many people can have a certain job so that they are in the business of protecting those who have the job already against anyone who wants to enter the market. The most ridiculous example is the sale of taxi permits or medallions. A medallion to drive a taxi in New York City recently went for one million dollars! It is unimaginable.

Can you imagine City Hall trying to fix the number of shoe stores or Web designers or CPAs allowed to operate in town? Arbitrary limits on the number of taxicabs should be considered just as ridiculous. The government has no right playing favorites, or crushing competition. The Institute for Justice describes itself as advocating for fairness and economic liberty; what it really seeks to protect is the American Dream. In Milwaukee today. In New York and Boston, perhaps, tomorrow.

In other examples, the government requires licenses for certain jobs that should not require a license such as hair-braiding or interior decoration. Often these limits are placed on entry-level jobs that don't require special education. Driving a taxi shouldn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get government permission.

This is a classic illustration of what economists call “rent-seeking’’ — manipulating the political system to gain economic benefits without providing any additional value to society in exchange. Imposing caps on the number of taxis enriches existing owners with windfall profits. But by making the cost of cab ownership obscenely high, it prevents countless would-be cabbies from going into business for themselves. And by stifling competition, it drives fares through the roof while lowering the quality and availability of service.

The only people with an interest in continuing this silly system are those already employed. Don't these local government officials have an interest in taking an easy step to help ordinary people start up such businesses? Apparently not.

Cruising the Web

Another example that we're becoming more like declining Rome: adult men gathering together to share their interest in "My Little Pony."

One interesting sidelight of the Herman Cain story is that people are learning more about how sexual harassment allegations work out in the real world. As Curt Levey writes today in the WSJ, it is not easy for an employee to prove a hostile environment. However, the bad publicity and cost of legal fees is so high that most businesses would prefer to settle ahead of time rather than go to trial. Some feminists are worrying that this story will convince some women not to bring allegations; another concern is that more women will decide to use this story as a model of how to lever a higher severance package than they might ordinarily have merited. Both the accuser and accused deserve better.

Unite the tea party and the OWS protesters: end corporate welfare. It would be good for government, business, and the taxpayer. There's one way to cut out close to one or two hundred billion a year.

Timothy Carney is right: conservatives should not be playing the race card.

Republicans shouldn't get cocky. There are still viable pathways for Obama to win next year.

Obama opts for the limited modified hangout strategy.

Ed Morrissey is absolutely right: the OWS people are sounding more and more like Animal Farm every day.

If the Politico reporters, as they claim, have seen actual documentation of the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain, why aren't they reporting what they saw?

As my European History class is finishing up our study of the French Revolution, it's eye-opening to read daily about how the leaders of Europe today are squelching the possibility of democratic votes on their chosen policies. They certainly stomped on the chance of the Greeks holding a vote on accepting the bailout or even rejecting the Euro.

Cruising the Web

Don Surber contrasts NOW's reaction to the Paula Jones complaint against Bill Clinton to their deep moral indignation at Herman Cain. They're so consistently biased. Remember Gloria Steinem's "one free grope" rule to defend Bill Clinton's sexual approaches to Kathleen Willey.

ACORN officials in New York City go to Defcon 5 after reports that they're involved in paying people to protest at Occupy Wall Street.

Jay Cost explains that the GOP needs someone who can play the game of politics. And Herman Cain isn't it.
Some Harvard students walked out of Greg Mankiw's introductory economics class as part of the Occupy movement. They feel that the course has a conservative bias and should devote more attention to other economic theories such as Marxism. Just what our colleges need - more Marxist economics. The Harvard Crimson rightly takes them to task.

Furthermore, the students’ attempt to connect their classroom protestations to the Occupy movement illustrates the disjointed and often unfocused nature of the movement. Indeed, it seems ironic that students in an introductory economics course at Harvard feel that by walking out of their completely optional lecture taught by a famous economist on the theme of income inequality feel that their actions ought to be considered a sign of solidarity with the Occupy movement. Such protests don’t show solidarity, they show ignorance and a lack of self-awareness.

Daniel Henninger points out that Texas has been a real success story in building jobs, but it's not clear that Rick Perry is the one responsible for that success.

Pass a bill that is "legislative perfection." It's not only good policy, but extremely popular.

Mona Charen looks at the moral relativism that is taught now in school.

Here is a movement that I cannot understand: young men who gather together to watch "My Little Pony" together. They call themselves "bronies" - basically borthers who are fascinated by "My Little Pony." Weird.

Obama's failure in Iraq

Charles Krauthammer has a devastating commentary today on Obama's failure in Iraq. As Krauthammer points out, Obama was handed a successful Iraq with very little that the President had to do to maintain that success.

Barack Obama was a principled opponent of the Iraq war from its beginning. But when he became president in January 2009, he was handed a war that was won. The surge had succeeded. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been routed, driven to humiliating defeat by an Anbar Awakening of Sunnis fighting side-by-side with the infidel Americans. Even more remarkably, the Shiite militias had been taken down, with U.S. backing, by the forces of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They crushed the Sadr militias from Basra to Sadr City.

Al-Qaeda decimated. A Shiite prime minister taking a decisively nationalist line. Iraqi Sunnis ready to integrate into a new national government. U.S. casualties at their lowest ebb in the entire war. Elections approaching. Obama was left with but a single task: Negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to reinforce these gains and create a strategic partnership with the Arab world’s only democracy.

This was what Obama proclaimed as his strength - negotiating. He was supposed to be the master of diplomacy because other countries would be so honored to be negotiating with The One that he could gain America's objectives. He handed over the task to Joe Biden who was supposed to be this genius on foreign policy with insights gained from his leadership of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. And the result of having these two supposed masters of diplomacy has been an utter failure.

He blew it. Negotiations, such as they were, finally collapsed last month. There is no agreement, no partnership. As of Dec. 31, the U.S. military presence in Iraq will be liquidated.

And it’s not as if that deadline snuck up on Obama. He had three years to prepare for it. Everyone involved, Iraqi and American, knew that the 2008 SOFA calling for full U.S. withdrawal was meant to be renegotiated. And all major parties but one (the Sadr faction) had an interest in some residual stabilizing U.S. force, like the postwar deployments in Japan, Germany and Korea.

Three years, two abject failures. The first was the administration’s inability, at the height of American post-surge power, to broker a centrist nationalist coalition governed by the major blocs — one predominantly Shiite (Maliki’s), one predominantly Sunni (Ayad Allawi’s), one Kurdish — that among them won a large majority (69 percent) of seats in the 2010 election.

Vice President Biden was given the job. He failed utterly. The government ended up effectively being run by a narrow sectarian coalition where the balance of power is held by the relatively small (12 percent) Iranian-client Sadr faction.

And Obama totally failed with the SOFA. First he rejected the recommendations of his commanders on the ground and said that he wanted only 3,000 to 5,000 troops.

A deployment so risibly small would have to expend all its energies simply protecting itself — the fate of our tragic, missionless 1982 Lebanon deployment — with no real capability to train the Iraqis, build their U.S.-equipped air force, mediate ethnic disputes (as we have successfully done, for example, between local Arabs and Kurds), operate surveillance and special-ops bases, and establish the kind of close military-to-military relations that undergird our strongest alliances.

The Obama proposal was an unmistakable signal of unseriousness. It became clear that he simply wanted out, leaving any Iraqi foolish enough to maintain a pro-American orientation exposed to Iranian influence, now unopposed and potentially lethal. Message received. Just this past week, Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurds — for two decades the staunchest of U.S. allies — visited Tehran to bend a knee to both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This is what Obama is trumpeting as a success - he has pulled us out of Iraq and left Iran an open door to come in an wield influence there. We'll be out of Iraq and Iran will be in. All because Barack Obama preferred to bring all our troops home without any care for what he left behind. This is not a success but a preparation for future failure.

OWS has its true effect on unemployment

This was inevitable. Now a business had to cut its staff because of the business it has lost due to Occupy Wall Street.

Marc Epstein, owner of the Milk Street Cafe at 40 Wall Street in lower Manhattan, said he had to cut 21 of the 97 members of his staff on Thursday and Friday after seeing sales plummet by 30 percent in the six weeks since the protests began. He's also been forced to slash the restaurant operating hours, moving up his closing time from 9 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays.

The incessant noise and police activity aside, Epstein said the biggest obstacle to his business has been the ubiquitous New York police barricades surrounding Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan.

"It's not only a physical impediment, it's a psychological impediment," Epstein told FoxNews.com. "You look down Wall Street now, and it looks like it's under siege. So, people who have to walk down Wall Street don't walk down Wall Street. It used to be a beautiful pedestrian mall, and now it's not -- it's ugly."

The owner of the cafe doesn't want to cast blame, but it's clear what he's thinking.

Asked if he felt the protesters realized they were hurting his business, Epstein replied: "I'm very afraid of getting into what they are thinking and whether it's the police or the protesters because I don't want to get mixed up in the battle between them. But everyone should understand the consequences of their actions and nobody is."

Gee, who is it who seems to be ignoring consequences? Might it be people who are asking for a bailout because they can't find a job to repay their deep college-loan debt? Or how about those people who think that bailing out banks means that they should be bailed out also and they should get a bigger slice of pie without wondering what all those bailouts will do to the economy and the chances for businesses to expand and hire some of those people who don't have jobs...people like the staff of the cafe which had the bad luck to be located near their camp-out?

Why Mitt Romney must be smiling today

For a campaign that hopes to squelch a story about sexual harassment charge by attacking the media for running a story fueled by anonymous sources, is it any more responsible to point a finger at the Perry campaign because a former aide of Cain who knew about about the sexual harassment allegations now works for Perry? Basing an accusation simply on circumstantial evidence seems less responsible than Politico running the story in the first place, a story that now seems to have been borne out.

And as Charles Krauthammer points out, on Monday Cain first said that he didn't know of the settlement and now we find out that he told an aide in 2003. Come on, get the story true and straight and then stick to it.

All that charm which was the real reason that Cain rose in the polls now doesn't seem quite so charming this week.

And think about that part of the story - did Herman Cain tell an aide before a senatorial run about these accusations, but didn't tell his aides about it before a presidential run? Was he less serious about running for president than senator?

Mitt Romney must be the luckiest guy around. And that's why sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

Cruising the Web

The Daily Caller looks at the arrest records of those protesters who were arrested at the New York Occupy Wall Street from mid-September to mid October and then looked up the addresses given on those arrest records. Guess what, the great majority of those arrested come from upscale homes with a median value of $305,000 over a hundred thousand over the median value of single-family homes. Meanwhile, the sexual assault crimes at Occupy events keep increasing. What is really stressing is that, for the sake of their purposeless revolution, the OWS people are trying to hush up accusations of sexual assaults.

The pragmatic argument on Mitt Romney - it's about where I am now.

Paul Ryan talks a bit more about why he made the decision not to run. And he expresses his contentment with the GOP presidential field. Mitt Romney has to be happy with Ryan's remarks that Romneycare, which Ryan has said is "not that dissimilar to Obamacare," is irrelevant in this year's election.

Is Herman Cain truly ignorant of the fact that China already has nuclear weapons and is not, as he said on PBS, "trying to develop nuclear capability"? Yikes. He seems to make one of these errors almost every time he speaks about foreign policy. And then we'll have another one of his corrections and we'll be told that his ability to admit mistakes is one of his more endearing qualities. It might be endearing, but I would like a president who has more of a knowledge about basic facts that any somewhat intelligent follower of these matters should know.

Jonah Goldberg revisits Tim Pawlenty's bad decision to get out of the race so early. If he were still in and people were searching around for the not-Romney candidate, he would be right there to pick up their support.

Only government people would think that designating a single national monument would lead to creating 3,000 jobs. Sure.

The media seem fascinated that Jon Huntsman can speak Chinese. But he's nowhere as fluent as he'd like to pretend. And why should we care anyway?

Information you can use: do candy bars ever go bad?

Here is Nancy Pelosi's solution for the South Carolina Boeing plant controversy: they should unionize or shut down. Does she even care that the workers at that plant voted overwhelmingly to decertify their union? Or do Democrats not favor that sort of individual "choice"?

What happens when we ignore price in medical decisions

We've had a mini-preview of what happens when Medicare sets the price too low on important medical decisions. As any economics student could tell us, when the price is too low, shortages will develop. This is what has happened with prescriptions drugs, as the WSJ tells us.

Most sterile injectables have been off-patent for decades, but unlike other cheap generic drugs with low profit margins, production is complex and requires special facilities. Nonetheless, George W. Bush and the Republican majority decided that Medicare was "overpaying" for these cancer drugs and included a 6% cap on price increases every six months in the 2003 prescription drug bill. These new price controls (which apply to the providers that purchase the drugs) took effect in 2005, when the shortages began.

In a rational market, sterile injectable prices would now be rising to encourage more supply, since the demand for cancer drugs is inelastic. The old reimbursement system, called "buy and bill," was imperfect, but at least it allowed prices to float and wasn't producing the scarcity that central planning always does. The sterile injectables that are in short supply currently sell for $37.88 a dose on average, and modest price increases could make the market economic.

The problem is compounded because Food and Drug Administration rules cause pointless delays. It takes as long as two and a half years to receive FDA manufacturing approval for a generic, so other drug makers can't ramp up production if a company cancels a product line due to these disincentives or even if the fragile supply chain for sterile injectables is contaminated and manufacture is delayed.

And thus we're at the situation we're facing today with big shortages of these drugs that many people need in their treatments for cancer.

Shortages have more than tripled since 2005, according to the University of Utah's Drug Information Service, and by the end of the year more than 300 products are likely to be back-ordered, in short supply or totally unavailable. Some are anesthetics and pain therapies, others emergency room "crash cart" drugs. But most—about 70% in 2010—belong to the class of drugs known as "sterile injectables" that are mainstays of the chemotherapy arsenal, such as paclitaxel or cytarabine.

So President Obama had a press moment to pump up his signing an executive order. He pretended that this was part of his jobs "we can't wait" program to paint the Republicans as blocking needed programs. But this shortage isn't the Republicans' fault. It's a bipartisan disaster. And it is a disaster that will literally cause some people to die.

Mr. Obama's executive order will do little if any good since it doesn't address or even mention this underlying distortion that Medicare has created. Instead, it merely expands the FDA reporting requirements about production interruptions or terminations. This is supposed to be an early warning system, but the scandal is that the availability of basic medicines could be allowed to become an emergency.

The order also tells the Justice Department to crack down on the "grey markets" that have sprung up to deliver supplies to doctors and hospitals, albeit with the inevitable markups. So rather than allow price signals to govern supply and demand, Mr. Obama wants to suppress them further.

The larger danger apart from the risks to the patients forced to receive compromised treatment is to the future of cancer progress. The common chemotherapy drugs are critical in clinical trials as the standard regimen or in combination with new options, and the Coalition of Cancer Cooperative Groups reports that as many as half of all ongoing trials require the drugs that are vanishing. This is a delay that really is killing people.

What do you think will be the effect of further price controls that Medicare and Obamacare will demand of the medical industry? There will be shortages. It is inevitable. What we are seeing today with these cancer drugs, we will see on a larger scale in the future.

Crusing the Web

Don't trust polls of Iowa. The caucuses are notoriously difficult to poll.

Chris Wallace called out Mitt Romney for not appearing on his Sunday show. But that is of a piece with his strategy of limiting his press availabilities during the campaign. That's what the press means by saying that he's a very disciplined candidate. He won't talk much to them.

Just what the GOP field needs is a debate hosted by "the View."

Ugh. The worst metaphor yet for how Republicans are grudgingly accepting Mitt Romney - comparing him to Charlotte Lucas's marriage of convenience to Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice.

What the NEA prefers to spend its money on.

Lee Habeeb notes that Joe Biden comes from Governmentland where jobs are "permanent."

Factchecking David Axelrod on what "all economists agree" that Obama's job bill will create millions of jobs. Sure.

Occupying the Occupiers

Why are OWS protesters upset that some "bums" have started hanging out at Zuccotti Park? It's not like they have legal title to the area. Why are they irritated that the police aren't removing the people they consider undesirable? If they are supposed to represent the 99%, shouldn't everyone, except millionaires, be welcome?

The police, whom many occupiers see as the enemy and who work under a mayor who’s made no secret of his distaste for the occupiers, have little reason to help them maintain order, and rarely seem to have entered the park over the last week for anything short of an assault. When officers have gone in, a wave of people carrying drugs (or with other reasons to fear arrest) moves away from them while others circle tightly around, cameras out. Even when organizers have requested their intervention, police enter to a mixed chorus of “brutality” and “pig” calls side by side with chanted reminders that “you are the 99%.”

But while officers may be in a no-win situation, at the mercy of orders carried on shifting political winds and locked into conflict with a so-far almost entirely non-violent protest movement eager to frame the force as a symbol of the oppressive system they’re fighting, the NYPD seems to have crossed a line in recent days, as the park has taken on a darker tone with unsteady and unstable types suddenly seeming to emerge from the woodwork. Two different drunks I spoke with last week told me they’d been encouraged to “take it to Zuccotti” by officers who’d found them drinking in other parks, and members of the community affairs working group related several similar stories they’d heard while talking with intoxicated or aggressive new arrivals.

The NYPD’s press office declined to comment on the record about any such policy, but it seems like a logical tactic from a Bloomberg administration that has done its best to make things difficult for the occupation — a way of using its openness against it.

“He’s got a right to express himself, you’ve got a right to express yourself,” I heard three cops repeat in recent days, using nearly identical language, when asked to intervene with troublemakers inside the park, including a clearly disturbed man screaming and singing wildly at 3 a.m. for the second straight night.

“The first time I’ve heard cops mention our First Amendment rights,” cracked one occupier after hearing a lieutenant read off of that apparent script.

“A lot of you people smell,” a waggish cop shot back later after an occupier asked if he might be able to help find more appropriate accommodations for a particularly pungent and out-of-sorts homeless man.

“The police are saying ‘it’s a free for all at Zuccotti so you can go there,’” said Daniel Zetah, a member of several working groups including community affairs. “Which makes our job harder and harder because the ratio is worse and worse.”

Organizers, who have already cut kitchen hours and taken other steps to discourage freeloading, are hoping that the winter cold will help clear out hangers-on and give the active participants time to consolidate their gains to date and refine their structures (including a bid to shift some power from the general assembly comprised of the semi-random group of people who show up on the Broadway steps each evening to the working group members who have invested time and effort in the occupation) to ensure the park maintains a high ratio of political participants to pilgrims drawn to a free-food, cop-free Eden.

“We’re in a limited physical space,” said Zetah, “and we’re past carrying capacity. By including these people we’re creating a space where other people, and particularly women, don’t feel safe — and by default you’re excluding them.”

So some unemployed people are welcome and others aren't. Well, this is what happens when you have an amorphous mission that united only by being unhappy about something.

Why wasn't Herman Cain better prepared for this story?

I can easily believe that there isn't much there there to this sexual harassment story, but there well could be. We have no idea.

So the question that bothers me is that Herman Cain and his campaign weren't better prepared for this story to come out. Politico acknowledged that they had been working on the story for over a week and had contacted the campaign. Herman Cain sells himself as a businessman who would know how to straighten up our economic morass. But shouldn't a businessman be a better leader when it comes to a mini-crisis affecting his campaign? Especially when the crisis involves his own personal history?

Why hadn't they contacted the National Restaurant Association to check on the facts that were available? Why was Herman Cain out there in national interviews saying that he was unaware of any settlement and then saying he was aware. If his story was that there was an agreement to pay a woman a termination settlement, why didn't he give that story in the first place?

Such bumbling extended the story another day and made the story about his changing stories rather than his denial of the accusation. They had a week to prepare for this story and they seemed totally unprepared. If they had come out with a clear answer and Cain's denials and explanations, I think, barring any further information, people would be willing to dismiss this as the sort of environment we live in now where women can make charges and business settle them with some relatively small award of money just to save on the legal costs and bad press. In fact, we might have had a national discussion of how absurd our sexual harassment laws have become where men have to worry about how everything they say to a woman might seem when told to lawyers.

Instead we have this lingering story that is tarnishing just what makes Cain appealing - his charm and frankness as well as his purported leadership skills.

With Republicans concerned about who will be the best opponent for Barack Obama and the expected media barrage in Obama's favor during the general election, they're looking for someone who has the chops to take on both Obama and the media. Cain has failed this first test.