Harris and The Impossible Dream

And even the romantic ideals of socialism, so appealing to youth, are crazy-inconsistent, as Kolakowski showed in his history of European socialism. They promise a freedom from work that nonetheless makes us rich, a central plan without tyranny, and individual liberties strictly subordinated to a general will. Craaaazy, kids.--McCloskey

Back from Austin. Neat town, flat and hot. Interesting motorized scooters everywhere. Trip was late and I am seriously tired. Good meeting. My first really bad Uber driver.

Adam Smith's policy of free trade was not based on any belief in the ‘perfection’ of markets but, rather, on his understanding that markets are superior to political interventions.

Race hustlers focus on “gaps” between whites and blacks with regard to income and educational attainment, which they attribute to “systemic” racism. But what about the gaps between Asian-Americans and whites? Asians, on average, earn considerably more than whites and as a group they do better in school.  Such incongruities would stagger honest, thinking people. Fortunately for the hustlers, they are spared any conflict.
A New York City Department of Education-sponsored panel designed to combat racism told parents that Asian American students “benefit from white supremacy” and “proximity to white privilege." The comments drew backlash from some parents and Asian activists, but not the Department of Education, which neither denied nor denounced them.
Stupid ideas about complicated problems create real risks to the people who hold them. And to the communities that tolerate them. The problem with really bad ideas is that it sometimes takes a lot of time for them to move along in the evolution of their implosion.

“Consequences of breeding from stock lacking human vitality always will give us social problems and perpetuate institutions of charity and crime.”--the sainted Margaret Sanger

                Harris and The Impossible Dream

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has seen a problem and she has a plan. 
The ideal?: Men and women should receive equal pay for equal work. She cites the known discrepancy between the median pay for men and women, a disparity that does not include choice of occupation, time worked and the like. She's smart; she must know the inaccuracy of the generalization but politics and ambition must rise above truth.

But her solution to the non-problem is worse. Instead of having workers claim and then prove discrimination, she wants the opposite: Companies would have to prove a negative—that they aren’t discriminating. Under Ms. Harris’s plan, every business with 100 workers or more would have to get an “Equal Pay Certification” from the federal government. To earn this gold star, they must “prove they’re not paying women less than men for equal work.”

That means demonstrating, to the satisfaction of some bureaucrat, that any wage gap “is based on merit, performance, or seniority—not gender.” The penalty for failure is a steep fine: “1% of their profits for every 1% wage gap they allow to persist.” More than 100,000 companies in the U.S. have at least 100 workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. Together they employ some 80 million people. How does Ms. Harris expect the government to expertly and impartially second guess all of their performance reviews? She says certification must be complete in three years.

If you were a company faced with this aggressive illogic and impossible criteria, what would you do?

Move.