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Big Mac Attack

In the face of walkouts by fast-food employees, and negative publicity over the “budgeting advice” provided by McDonalds to its workers, opponents of a higher minimum wage have  gone into high gear, warning that jobs will be lost and prices will rise precipitously if the minimum wage is increased.

What–they ask in ominous tones–would a Big Mac cost if the workers preparing and serving it made 15.00 an hour?

As it happens, we know the answer to that.

The Economist Magazine created and maintains a “Big Mac Index,” making it possible to compare the price of Big Macs in different countries with different wage scales. In Australia, where the minimum wage is 15.00 and the minimum wage for fast food workers is, for some reason, slightly higher–on July 1st, the fast food rate went up from $17.03 an hour to $17.98 an hour–a Big Mac costs 70 cents more than it does in the U.S.

Salvatore Babones is a senior lecturer in sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.. As he explained in a recent interview, 

What you get for that in Australia is you get to go to a fast food restaurant where you know that everybody behind the counter has full health insurance, everyone behind the counter gets a really good wage, they’re treated well, and they have, you know, options in life…

What about the argument that raising the minimum wage necessarily means fewer jobs?

There’s a theory that raising the minimum wage will result in fewer jobs. And that theory seems to make intuitive sense, that when wages are higher, you know, people hire fewer people. And in isolation that would be true. There’s an assumption economists like to make called ceteris paribus, which means all other things remaining equal, this would happen.

 But all other things are never equal. For example, if you raise the minimum wage, people make more money. That’s the first thing that’s not equal. As people make more money, they spend more, they pay more in taxes. The entire character of the economy changes.

As Babones points out, study after study confirms that no matter how “intuitively” persuasive the argument that raising the minimum wage will depress employment, it is an argument that has no empirical support. In the real world, it doesn’t work that way.

Interestingly, Australia was also the only rich country to dodge the Great Recession.

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Cyber Promises

Yesterday, I shared an internet frustration on my Facebook page. I was surprised–and gratified, in an unfortunate sort of way–with the responses.

Some background: A couple of years ago, someone persuaded me to join LinkedIn. After a month or two of “membership,” I decided that–whatever its merits–the site was not for me. So  I tried to leave–to “recuse” myself, as we lawyer types would say.

No way.

I tried everything. (Okay, every mechanism an old woman with limited internet skills could think of.) Nothing worked. I was a “forever” captive of the site.

Eventually, I gave up. I left my “membership” with LinkedIn, and simply ignored the occasional invitation to connect. But it gnawed at me. I felt impolite–rude–when I ignored an invitation. I wanted to reach out the the person issuing the invitation and explain that I was not declining to be friends or even “connections,” I was simply not participating in this cyberspace exercise.

The other day, when I received three invitations from Linked In, I realized that something needed to be done. So I posted a “just in case you are one of those I’ve ignored” all-purpose apology. And the floodgates opened.

I heard from a large number of people who shared my frustration. A couple of them also shared my guilt, and the impulse to explain “nothing personal” to those they ignored. I’m gratified to learn that I am not the only person in this predicament, but frustrated with yet another situation in which a tool intended to make life simpler/easier instead makes it more complicated.

The internet is a wonderful advance. I can’t remember life without google, and I wouldn’t want to go back.

But they don’t call glitches “bugs” for nothing. They sure bug me.

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Science and Democracy

The recent concerns voiced here and elsewhere about respect for science and science education are at their foundation about more than science. There is a connection between science and democracy that is only dimly recognized and rarely discussed.

The best articulation of that connection that I’ve encountered was in a 2010 book by Timothy Ferris, titled The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason and the Laws of Nature.

As Ferris notes, the nation’s founders were creatures of the Enlightenment, and well acquainted with the experimental nature of science–part of what they called “The New Learning.”  They applied the scientific method to their new political enterprise.

“What isn’t widely understood is that the way that democracies work is by constant experiment. Each election, each new law is, after all, a procedure designed to test a hypothesis about how to make constant improvements to a government.”

Ferris argues convincingly that the democratic revolution was sparked by the scientific one. The new approach to governing wasn’t merely a function of the embrace of reason, because–as current events keep reminding us–people can reason themselves into all sorts of conclusions that have a tenuous connection to reality. Science was the new ingredient, and while science requires reason, it isn’t just reason. It’s empiricism, experimentation…the same sort of experimentation that is the basis for democratic governance.

It was the advent of science and the scientific method that underscored the importance of decisions based on evidence.  As Ferris notes, dogma ruled the world before science came along, and dogma remains the preference of the majority of people today. (If you doubt the accuracy of that observation, look at Congress. Or Texas. Or, unfortunately, the Indiana Statehouse.) But democracy is not a dogma–it’s a method, a process not unlike the scientific method.

It is well to recognize that when strident anti-intellectual political figures attack scholarship as “elitism,”  when they dismiss scientific consensus on everything from evolution to climate change, when they call for “repealing” the Enlightenment, it isn’t only science they are attacking.

It’s democracy as we understand it.

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Trading the First Amendment for a Law License?

Yesterday’s Indianapolis Star carried a story about Paul Ogden and the Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Commission. It’s a story that should trouble anyone who really cares about the First Amendment, but especially lawyers.

The facts are fairly simple: Ogden represented a client before Hendricks Superior Court Judge David H. Coleman. In a private email,  he criticized the Judge, opining that he had a conflict of interest. At the time he wrote the email–and again, I note that this was a private communication–the judge had already been removed from the case for failing to act within an appropriate period of time.

It is unclear how the judge even found out about the email, but he did, and demanded an apology. Ogden refused. ( Paul is one of those people who will stand on principle even when doing so will clearly cost him.) Had he apologized, that would have been the end of it. Since he didn’t–he faces loss of his license to practice law.

Think about that for a minute. A “transgression” that could be cured by a simple apology is nevertheless so serious that the Disciplinary Commission can respond by destroying a lawyer’s ability to make a living. And what is that transgression? “Defaming” a judge by criticizing him in a private email.

As a recovering lawyer, I find this seeming vendetta very troubling. As a lifelong civil libertarian, I find it dangerous.

The Disciplinary Rule prohibiting certain criticisms of courts and the justice system is there for a reason–it is meant to avoid statements that might prejudice a case, or demean the legal process and thus respect for the rule of law. Imposing that rule in a case where a lawyer has publicly cast aspersions on a judge or court can be justified–although even then, there are limits imposed by the free speech provisions of the First Amendment. (I recall another Indiana case where a lawyer included a snide remark in a footnote in a brief he filed. The brief was a public document. The Indiana Supreme Court sanctioned the attorney; the U.S. Supreme Court overruled that decision, citing the First Amendment.)

In this case, the argument that criticisms of the court undermine public confidence in the justice system is simply not tenable, because the criticism was not public. And a comment in a private communication, made after the judge no longer sat on the case, could hardly prejudice the outcome.

Most of us, caught in a similar situation, would have simply given the Judge the apology he demanded, thus making the problem disappear. It is a rare lawyer who will risk his license to defend a principle, even a principle as important as our First Amendment right to speak our minds.

Perhaps there is more to this story, but from what has been reported it seems to me that the person “demeaning” the justice system is the Judge who pursued this complaint. As a practical matter, no one would ever have known about the allegation of a conflict had the complaint not been lodged.

The larger question, of course, is whether the receipt of a license to practice law comes with a condition that the recipient relinquish the future exercise of his or her First Amendment free speech rights. If so, those considering the practice of law might be well advised to rethink that choice.

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How Far It Has Gone….

As Maddowblog has noted,” this has simply never happened before. There is no precedent in American history for Congress approving a massive new public benefit, a president signing it into law, the Supreme Court endorsing the benefit’s legality, and then having an entire political party actively and shamelessly working to sabotage the law.”

The law, of course, is the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.”

It isn’t only the 39 votes to repeal the ACA–votes for repeal that GOP Congressmen know are entirely symbolic and will die in the Senate.  As several media sources have reported, Republican Congressmen are now refusing to help constituents who call their offices with questions. “We know how to forward a phone call,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). He added, “[A]ll we can do is pass them back to the Obama administration. The ball’s in their court. They’re responsible for it.”

Then there are the Governors, like Indiana’s own Mike Pence, who are refusing to participate in Medicaid expansion, even though such refusal costs their state millions of federal dollars it would otherwise receive. (I won’t even dignify the Pence Administration’s recent bald-face lies about projected costs of individual health insurance policies.)

My question is: why?

The GOP has no alternative plan to offer, possibly because the ACA was the GOP’s approach, back when the party was composed of adults focused upon solving real problems. They don’t even pretend to have a different solution to a healthcare crisis that threatened to destroy  the American economy while leaving fifty million Americans uninsured.

They don’t want to solve the  problem. They just want to undo the solution that was cobbled together by that black guy in the White House and ushered through the process by the woman who was briefly Speaker–the solution that was acceptable to the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies that had to be placated if anything was to be done.

I have real problems with Obamacare as policy, but I recognize that it is infinitely better than nothing. I also recognize that it is the best we could do politically. I am absolutely incapable of understanding what motivates these people who simply want to repeal it, without putting anything in its place. They clearly don’t give a rat’s you-know-what about the people who had no access to healthcare before the ACA. They don’t care about the small businesses that couldn’t compete for good employees because they couldn’t afford to offer healthcare. They don’t care about the fact that 50% of the personal bankruptcies that cost businesses dearly and are a drag on the economy are a result of medical costs incurred by uninsured and underinsured Americans. They don’t care that before the ACA, America was spending 2 1/2 times more than the next most expensive country for a system ranked 37th in the world.

All they seem to care about is beating that guy in the White House. If people have to suffer or die as a consequence, that’s tough. If the economy has to take a hit, so be it. Nothing, evidently, is as important as thwarting Barack Obama.

That’s how far it has gone.

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