There's No Socialist Like An Old Socialist

This absolute gem of a leftist view comes from the old defender of unions and organized labor who writes for the Washington Post, your friend and mine, Harold Meyerson, who writes on Thursday about the mythical wonders of the left:

"The polarization so evident in Congress is but a pale reflection of the growing chasm separating red states from blue, particularly on issues of workers’ incomes and rights. While states under Republican rule are weakening workers’ ability to bargain with employers and reducing the pay of construction workers, states and cities where Democrats dominate are hiking the minimum wage, requiring employers to grant paid sick days and even considering penalizing large employers who don’t pay their workers enough."

The laughable part is that Meyerson sees this as the Democrats actually doing a good thing by raising minimum wages, forcing mandatory sick days and fining employers of low-wage positions.  Now, Harold Meyerson turned 65 years old in March, and one would have thought that, in keeping with the Cubbyhole Theory of Maturity, he would have discovered rationality.

Because he certainly hasn't discovered economics.  Else, how would you explain his thought that, say, requiring employers to grant paid sick days is a good thing?  I know I've already disposed of this issue, back in January, but I guess old Harold doesn't read me (or remember me, or maybe believe me).

Those same cities and states where Democrats "dominate" are laden with huge unfunded pension liabilities they can't dream of addressing and are forced into bankruptcy (Detroit); they have criminals running the streets after hamstringing their police forces (Baltimore), and their legislatures, like Maryland, are failing to make the payments on their union-driven pension liabilities because they've already soaked the taxpaying wage-earners as much as they can (Maryland).

Now they want to force their abysmal concepts of government economics onto the private sector.  Just listen to the typical discussion when the Meyersons of the world are challenged with pesky facts, like the one where adding mandatory paid sick leave as a legally-enforced benefit adds a cost to the business without adding any benefit.  The Meyerson character will respond with what a necessary thing sick leave is, people need to heal, be with their families, blah, blah.  Nothing ever about who pays for it, just the sob story.

If they actually do say anything at all about paying for the leave, it will be that business is awash in cash and should be giving it to the "workers" (what is this, the Soviet Union?) anyway rather than making profit commensurate with the risk taken.

Never mind that eventually no one will open a new business if they can't make money.

Never mind that the costs of every one of those proposals get passed immediately to the customer in higher prices -- so in the same way you and I pay for government profligacy like "bridges to nowhere", you and I as customers will pay for the sick leave -- or not buy the product.

Of course, if you want to be accurate, there are indeed businesses awash in cash, because the regulatory state has made it ever more challenging to hire and fire, to invest in capital improvements and to build new facilities.  It's wiser for businesses to protect their shareholders (which include all those pension funds from the unions Meyerson loves) by hoarding cash until a president comes along with an actual economic plan.

But when you legislate against those businesses that actually have cash, by shoving stupid, counter-productive rules at them, you punish all businesses, including the ones barely breaking even, who are not in a competitive position to raise prices because of those same cash-flush larger businesses.

I know this first-hand, as a former small-business owner who lost everything trying to create a business which had employed eight people.  When you mandate that Home Depot offer sick leave, you're also telling Annie's Hardware down the street that she has to, too.  Guess whose price increases will choke off their business (hint: the answer is not "Home Depot").

Harold Meyerson doesn't think that far.

Democrat-dominated governments are "hiking the minimum wage" and that, too is a "good thing" to him, although there is practically no difference between that and sick leave, in the impact to business of an increased cost without attendant value.  Has Meyerson never done a P&L, or has he just been a leftist writer all his life?  Does he even know how to read an income statement?  Did Marx?

Missing from his article also was the impact of Obama's open-borders policy.  Good ol' Econ 101 tells you that a huge increase in the available supply of labor in any sector of the economy will drive down its price (wages).  So now we add millions of under-skilled laborers to the economy without jobs to put them in, competing with domestic under-skilled laborers for that finite number of jobs.  Bang -- down goes the wage, according to the laws of supply and demand.

But Meyerson wants to allow this influx (where are his sainted union bosses' voices in this?) to grow the labor force.  At the same time, he wants to mandate higher wages and benefits even though business doesn't need to offer them to compete for the saturated pool of candidates that Obama is letting in (so they will grow up and vote Democrat).

How will the displaced workers -- many of them black -- vote, when they find their jobs gone to illegal immigrants?  Does Obama and, by extension, Meyerson, think that they are so ignorant that they will vote against their own self-interest forever, as they have since the Great Society?  Do they think that the mostly-Hispanic immigrants coming in and competing for jobs are so ignorant that they won't see through the politics of their immigration?

But, as usual, I digress.

The bottom line is that the proposals Meyerson celebrates are being pushed by the leaders of the very Democratic cities and states that are financial disasters on their way to -- or already into -- bankruptcy.  That this is the natural outcome of policies that run counter to basic economics seems not to matter.

So I must ask ... do they laugh in the Editorial Office of the Post when they read his stuff?

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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