Not a Potted Plant

A while back, Derek Thompson wrote a good piece on The Atlantic about the overall costs of employment. Contrary to what some are suggested overall compensation for labor hasn’t actually fallen very much as a percentage of the GDP. Rather, wages themselves have as other costs of employment have filled in the gaps. In other words, we’re seeing less money than ever, but employers are not paying less (as a percentage of the GDP, at any rate). Those of us who have been following wages either know this (that our wages are being cut by the increased costs of health insurance) or at least shouldn’t be surprised by it, but it’s worth pointing out when someone ponies up a graph about how selfish employers are being by either not employing enough of us or not paying us enough.

This is an argument for disentangling health insurance from employment, effectively telling companies that we want them to hire but once they do they are on the hook for our outlandish health care costs. But that’s not all. Thompson goes on to point out:

Liberals and conservatives share a similar goal that businesses should hire more people. Liberals do a better job (or perhaps a louder job) of protecting workers’ rights. Conservatives, I think, do a better job (or perhaps a louder job) of pointing out that protecting workers is expensive, and it probably leads to fewer hires. That’s right. All this non-wage compensation is a hurdle for employers. Why else would the president think that lowering the payroll tax would stimulate hiring?

If your final goal is to make workers cheaper, you’ll probably want to argue for: (1) defined contribution plans that don’t guarantee high retirement payouts; (2) a smaller or eliminated payroll tax; and (3) a private market for health insurance without government subsidies for employers. The rebuttal would be that defined benefit is better for workers; Social Security reduces elderly poverty; and an out-of-office market for health care is exactly what Obamacare is all about in the long run.

I’m less than entirely interested in the partisan ramifications. But this points to a natural tension. Namely, the more expensive we make employing people, the less people that corporations are going to want to employ. This applies to health insurance, of course, but also to the other things he mentions. This isn’t an argument to make employing people as cheap and easy as possible in any and all circumstances, but it does make me wonder that, in these dour economic times, those who are complaining about the conditions of those who do have jobs and the number of people who do not are talking, to some extent, at cross-purposes.

So long as we’re going to spend the money anyway, I don’t really have a problem with the government (for instance) hiring people and putting them to work on this project or the other. I could even be convinced that getting these people work is a positive in and of itself, even if they’re pushing a rock back and forth. The problem, as I see it, is that there is the natural desire, once they have work, to express horror and outrage at the fact that these workers might not be paid as much as their civil service counterparts. Contractors would not only be hired, but subject to Davis-Bacon laws, for instance. And employees should have the same pension opportunities as other employees. Because if we don’t, the government might start favoring these temp employees over the real-deal ones that have dedicated their lives to government work.

When Rick Perry was announcing for president, some people pointed out that Rick Perry’s “small” government state actually hires a whole lot of government workers. They (or other campmen) also point out, with respect to teachers, that they are not unionized and are paid comparatively little. These are supposed to be knocks on Rick Perry and Texas (the number of workers demonstrating hypocrisy, their compensation demonstrating stinginess and thirdworldliness), but to me these two things actually go hand-in-hand. Labor flexibility may drive down wages, but also frees up resources to hire more people.

To move back to the private sector, the more we demand of employers, the more onerous hiring seems to be. Requiring employers to document every misstep to fire someone that they want to fire, for instance, makes overall costs of employment greater. Not just in terms HR costs and the like, but also the costs of non-productive and toxic employees who are a poor fit for their job or their company as a whole. The more vacation time we require, the more dead-time employers are paying for. Even the more unpaid time off we require, the more of a productivity drag is created by someone not being there to do a job they evidently needed to pay someone to do.

On the other side of things, of course, work conditions in the United States are hardly the envy of the West. And some things, like eliminating overtime pay, can actually reduce the need of employers to hire people more. While it’s not true that one guy working 80 hours a week is as productive as two working 40, employers wouldn’t have to work hard at convincing themselves that 4 employees working 50 hours a week are more productive than 5 working 40. It might even be true. And without at least some of the protections that make employment cost an employer more, the employers enjoy a very significant power advantage. This is especially true in exactly the sort of dour economy we are presently facing. And even when it’s not true, a lot of employers seem to have convinced themselves that it is.

So I’m not entirely sure how we work out way out of this. I think that, to some extent, we have to look at it on an issue-by-issue basis. Unfortunately, there is such a temptation (one I am not immune to) to “take sides” and assume that we need to look at employers as entities to be contained rather than empowered or look at anything that benefits an employer as inherently benefiting the employed and would-be employed. In either case, we can decline to want to “give in” on anything under the rubric of giving an inch and losing a mile. With politics and business both being as tribal as they are, this is a hard thing to accomplish. Much more difficult than either demonizing employers or painting those that are upset with their work conditions as lazy and entitled.

Following up on a story I discussed in October and again in November, concerning a Latin cross atop a municipal water tower in the Western Tennessee town of Whiteville, the Freedom From Religion Foundation was apparently unimpressed with the town’s defiant Mayor’s decision to remove only one arm of the cross — leaving it a different symbol but still a clear reminder of the symbol of the Christian religion. FFRF filed suit, on its own behalf and on behalf of a resident of Whiteville identified only as “John Doe.” And unable to resist, the town’s Mayor has responded in in what I’m learning to recognize as his typically colorful fashion — one which I predict he will find was ultimately counterproductive. Continue Reading →

This week’s question is going to be a little trickier than some, so I am going to give out several hints at once.

Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Vermont have none.

There were roughly 650 of these in 2006 in the entire world, on every continent but Antarctica. There are over 700 now.

There are roughly 150 in the United States. Over a third of these are in three states.

Canada has roughly 20, with one in most provinces.

Dear sweet baby Jesus,

Please please please please please make the bad people at Google change the GMail interface back to what it used to be. I hate the new interface. The mail items are spaced too widely apart. The non-text based icons are not in intuitive locations. The check/uncheck box and the action bars are practically invisible, so I can’t hardly manage my mail any more. When I do, it is time-consuming, frustrating, and I make mistakes, deleting mail I wanted to archive or archiving something I hadn’t read yet.

Seriously, I hate it with a burning white fury like You had for the moneychangers at the Temple, baby Jesus. But You could give the moneychangers the smackdown right there.

What’s particularly upsetting about this, baby Jesus, is that they didn’t give me any choice in the matter. They just did it. They didn’t ask anyone. They staked out all kinds of a user base, offering all sorts of goodies for free to millions and millions of people. I was one of them, baby Jesus, I believed them when they said their slogan was “Don’t be evil.” But they are evil, baby Jesus, they’ve become evil. Forgive me, O baby Jesus, for believing Google’s filthy lies and putting my trust in them.

I wrote them a feedback letter. I asked them why they would do something like this. They haven’t said anything back. Everywhere I look, it seems like they’re actually proud of what they’ve done. Can You even believe that, baby Jesus? How can a big company like Google be proud of something so awful? It’s like a big oil company losing control of an offshore drilling rig and saying “Yeah, we just dumped about a billion gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico but what are you going to do about it, bitches? We’ll clean it up in our own good time.”

Why would You let them do this, baby Jesus? Why? Why couldn’t they just leave well enough alone? Weren’t You already providing for them with all the money they could eat? Please, sweet baby Jesus, I can’t understand how You could let something like this happen, being that You’re all powerful and all loving and all knowing and all that. I’m sure You have a plan and I know You work in mysterious ways. But this feels like too much to bear. Give me strength, baby Jesus, give me strength to cope.

Thanks for listening, sweet little baby Jesus. And thank You for inventing the Internet and thank You for blessing me with my hot wife and thank You for looking all cute out there in that manger out there in front of City Hall with the plastic wise men and by the way the one kneeling with the frankenincense (I think, I get that mixed up with the myrrh sometimes) needs one of his light bulbs replaced. Please make those bad people up in Mountain View just go back to the way things were. Amen.

The criteria for the game: the person must have been on an active roster of an NFL team at some point in the active season. On the IR list counts, on waivers counts only if the player was on a roster at some point this year, so David Garrard (for instance) could be on the list — but Mr. Garrard has far too prosaic a name to be included on the list. Even living in diverse Southern California as I do and encountering people with all sorts of names from all sorts of cultures, there are still some names floating around NFL rosters that make me look twice. My initial nominees for most unlikely names, intending no aspersions to any of the players thus named either as people or as performers:

• D’Qwell Jackson, Middle Linebacker, Cleveland Browns
• Jacquizz Rodgers, Running Back, Atlanta Falcons
• Richie Incognito, Guard, Miami Dolphins
• D’Brickashaw Ferguson, Tackle, New York Jets
• Guy Whimper, Outside Tackle, Jacksonville Jaguars

Fine players, all. Worked hard to get where they are and deserving of respect. Just names that make me look twice, is all I’m saying. I’m sure you can add more. At some point we’ll have enough and maybe reach a consensus about the most distinctive of all these players’ names.

I’ve had two extraordinary bottles recently, both obtained at reasonable expense, and both of which demonstrated the benefit that comes from cellaring. Now, some Readers find reading about someone else drinking wine an astonishingly insipid subject, like having to listen to a co-worker’s detailed description of their morning workout. However, I will reward your slogging through the bulk of this post’s wine bragging with my NFL lock of the week, links to oenological science and a potential travel destination, and a bit of life advice.

Continue Reading →

Attempting to arrest his meteoric flameout from the GOP’s good graces, Rick Perry is running this ad on TV in Iowa:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again. I’m Rick Perry, and I approve this message.

Now, I could call Perry’s ad despicably bigoted and insultingly dishonest right here and be done with it. But instead, I’ll proffer actual, verifiable facts, and you can decide for yourself if I’m being unfair to this desparate candidate. Continue Reading →

I loves me them Mythbusters. (Warning — link to the show autoloads to loud audio.) But they can only blow up stuff for so long before something goes wrong. And it finally did — seems that they shot a cannon through someone’s house and into a neighbor’s minivan. Good pictures available at MSN. This can’t be the first time something has gone awry, either. In this case, no one was hurt; this is why people buy insurance. I can only imagine what sorts of premiums they have to pay for that insurance, though. Imagine and shudder.

My plan is to run chronologically through a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases and attempt to make them comprehensible to the intelligent layman.

While my focus will be on constitutional issues, I may deviate from that from time to time for interesting or famous cases in other fields of law. I don’t intend to be as in-depth as a law school analysis but I hope that readers will be able to understand the intellectual issues at play, build up a vocabulary of concepts for our commentariat when new legal issues arise, and maybe turn on some light bulbs for some folks.

No promises as to frequency. While a chronological approach is easy from an editorial perspective, I hope that it also builds up a feel for lawyers and laity alike of the evolution of the law over time.

I will entertain requests. I suspect I will start with Marbury v. Madison over the course of this week,  unless my survey of pre-1800 cases reveals something really cool.

And I’m just going to post these here on the sub-blog, because I don’t know how much appetite there is on the front page for a project like this.

The prospect of Donald Trump moderating a debate is what finally made things click.

It occurred to me the other day as I was leaving a comment elsewhere: if someone had written a TV show and the plot followed the current Republican primary, I would have some serious problems with it. Namely, I would pan the show as unrealistic. A joke. Liberal Hollywood’s parody of what the Republican Party is. Herman Cain? Who the hell acts like that. There is no way that a party would seriously give a serial-adulturing, ideologically muddled, lobbying-compromised former House Leader a shot at the nomination. Hollywood couldn’t devise a more repugnant figure as the potential head of a party that they want noting to do with. The comparisons between Rick Perry and Rob Ritchie have, of course, frequently been made. But in some sense, Ritchie would seem downright normal compared to a lot of the candidates. And though the connection hasn’t been made, I see some similarities between Mitt Romney and Bob Russell, the simply unpalatable (to many) candidate who doesn’t belong there but is there because he’s there and his biography doesn’t entirely discount his presence.

Of course, what would be missing from a TV plot is the “good guy” Republican. Which is to say, the Republican that demonstrates his commitment to morality and apple pie by spending his time criticizing other Republicans (as opposed to Matthew Santos, who demonstrates his commitment to morality and apple pie by being well to the left of Democratic Party candidates). Jon Huntsman comes close to this, but more recently has revealed himself to actually be pretty roundly conservative and the sense of “moderation” is more about temperament than policy. Also, whatever else might be said of him, he is not “leading man” material in the way that even Bob Dole was. Unless it was all a comedy. And, for that matter, maybe it is.

The degree to which the GOP seems to really be becoming as unhinged as the Democrats always said it was is actually somewhat hard to determine except out of hindsight (if Romney wins the nomination and runs a conventional campaign, this will all be forgotten and the equivalent of an adolescent phase and not any sort of genuine threat to the republic). Indeed, it’s that my entire adult life I have heard over and over again that the GOP is truly unhinged that makes me skeptical that it’s genuinely true, all evidence to the contrary, in a “boy who cried wolf” sort of way. I’m still in wait-and-see mode. If anybody but Romney (or Huntsman or maybe Johnson, haha) gets the nomination, at this point, they will have made their critics case for them. (I am thinking of the GOP as a “they”; this is not a promising sign).

It’s worth noting the various twists and turns that lead us here. Were it not for a Hike Down the Appalachian Trail, there is a good chance that Mark Sanford would already be the presumptive nominee. Or at least fighting it out with Romney over it in a fight he would ultimately win (or, alternately, a fight that would make Romney look better than he currently does on Mitt’s path to victory). This actually echoes 2008, where but for the word Macaca, George Allen would have been re-elected and would have been in a great position to win the Republican nomination. Or, if McCain would have pulled it out anyway, it would have put Allen in the catbird seat as the next in line for 2012. So Sanford or Allen could be the nominee, but aren’t. And instead we have Romney-Gingrich-Paul.

And, of course, there was Tim Pawlenty, who was my choice early on. Some people have said that he has to be kicking himself for having dropped out. Indeed, had he stuck around, his turn might have come eventually. I think he will be an object lesson in “sticking it out” for future campaigns. But most future campaigns will not be like this one. And, truth be told, Pawlenty’s time may never have come anyway. The carousel of anti-Romneys fit a particular mold (fundamentally unserious – bad liberal Hollywood fiction) and he simply doesn’t fit it. I would actually like to think he’d gotten his turn, if only because he isn’t Trump-Cain-Gingrich and it would make being a (nominal) member of the party a little easier to stomach. But we could be well on our way through the primaries before people start to get serious. Or it might never happen.

The press always salivates over the prospect of an open convention. Which, of course, is more unrealistic fiction (as in The West Wing – also, like someone as disgraced as John Hoynes would ever get that kind of second… oh… yeah…. Gingrich). But it would be a fitting end to the most bizarre political theater I have ever seen. And who knows, maybe we could find an Eric Baker (such as Pawlenty, for that matter). By that point, little more than a lamb to the slaughter, but absent an end to the madness coming up, a less offensive or problematic lamb than some.

Eight hundred words later, and I’m still not sure of the answer to the fundamental question of how we found ourselves in the twisted plot of a writer that doesn’t know the first thing about how politics actually works.