Some shorters

Megan was definitely herself today.

The vapidity of cable news, part 998 in a continuing series:

The cable news shows this morning were full of wide-eyed anchor larvae reporting that with gas prices high, people were driving less, and instead using more public transit! Oh, for a land in which the downward-sloping demand curve was not such a constant source of surprise and wonder to the broadcast media.

Megan, if had conscious control of your ability to be this ironic, you would have been a great writer.

Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ideas about the minimum wage:

Both at Crooked Timber, and in my own beloved comment threads, the suggestion has been made that the minimum wage is really swell because it gets rid of low-productivity jobs that only pay the minimum wage.
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Helping the moderately paid worker by forcing the least skilled out of the legal job market is a very, very bad policy. Whether or not you think that the government ought to be in the business of transferring wealth from one segment of society to another, I hope we can all agree that at least the transfers oughtn't to go upwards.

In this hypothetical situation, therefore, you cannot redistribute wealth at all, save perhaps by government handouts. You can't give the poor more money via paying them living wages, because the rich will get upset and throw a tantrum destroying the economy, like they haven't been doing for most of the last 30 years. Guess you've gotta accept the status quo, eh?

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Actually, her next two posts deserve individual treatment. More to come, in relatively quick fashion.