Ray Harvey

Most in the mainstream are busy vilifying McDonald’s, but not me.

In fact, I’ve defended McDonald’s before, against the outrageous environmental hoops through which the religion of environmentalism has pressured McDonald’s to jump, and so I was particularly delighted to read Jeffry Tucker’s excellent essay also in defense of those golden arches.

Here’s an excerpt:

McDonald’s as the Paradigm of Progress

I feel vindicated by recent data on this company’s hiring in the midst of terrible economic times.

The national labor-participation rate has been falling for a decade and is now as low as it was during the 1982 recession. If people were leaving the workplace with wads of cash and every intention of living out their dream of a life of leisure, this might be good news.

Sadly, all evidence runs the other direction. People want remunerative work but can’t find it, and their situation is getting worse not better, thanks mainly to legal restrictions and artificial burdens borne by institutions that would otherwise be hiring.

McDonald’s appears to be responsible for more than half the new jobs being created right now: its April jobs fair added 30,000 people to its payrolls. It has bucked the trend — a bit like swimming against the tide.

But instead of congratulating this great company for doing the impossible, the judgment in the press is harsh. Burger flipping is the only work to be had out there? Surely this is evidence of how pathetic economic growth is.

The trouble with this line is that it doesn’t recognize how difficult it is for an institution to adapt itself and still grow in this climate. And how does McDonald’s do it? It is an old recipe: watch the markets, emulate the successful, adapt and change, and slavishly serve the consuming public.

The reinvention of McDonald’s began only two years ago, as its management noted the new vogue for healthy food and fancy coffees and fruit smoothies served up in a posh environment such as Starbucks offers. Can McDonald’s, the very embodiment of the lowbrow urge for a greasy burger and fries, actually horn in on this market?

It doesn’t seem likely, but the company gave it a try. There were new breakfast items like fruit parfaits. There was an apple-and-walnuts salad, along with many other premium salads, for lunch. There was a new premium burger made of Angus beef (which to me tastes as good as a restaurant-style burger). There were new fruit smoothies that taste as good (or better) than the ones that cost twice as much at the hip smoothie bars.

Not that McDonald’s merely chases public fads. The company responded to an earlier outcry for diet food by making the McLean sandwich in the mid 1990s. No one bought it. The company dropped it from the menu. The lesson is that public piety is not the same thing as actual spending habits. Future development would be rooted in reality, and it certainly is today.

Most of all there was the addition of new coffee drinks. Each is made from freshly ground beans, with the addition of fresh milk (whole or low fat), all made upon order. McDonald’s added its own spin. The most annoying aspect of Starbucks, as everyone knows, is the wait. Everything is done by hand, from the cleaning to the packing of grounds.

McDonald’s has a new machine that does everything. The beans fall through a large funnel. The milk is sucked out of gallons from the doors underneath. The nozzles and containers are cleaned after each drink by superhot steam blasts. The human hand only gets involved at the beginning to push buttons and at the end to give it all one last stir. The time it takes to make this fresh treat is reduced to half or even one-third of the Starbucks time.

Then there is the cost issue. A latte at McDonald’s costs 40 percent less than the same at Starbucks. And you don’t have to use strange words like venti or grande when you order. At McDonald’s, they seem to understand normal English words like small, medium, and large….

In a striking way, this approach is deeply embedded in the company’s history. The first restaurant opened in 1940 and closed for renovations in 1948, only to reopen as the first drive-through restaurant. Its first indoor-seating restaurant didn’t open until 1962. Since then, the company has taken glorious steps forward that have foreshadowed global change: it opened in Moscow in 1990, Warsaw in 1992, and on the Web in 1996.

Let’s be clear here. It’s not the case that the management of this company has an unusually high devotion to the well-being of humanity. The management is following the pricing signals and making entrepreneurial judgments all in the service of the consuming public. It is a great competitor, relentlessly reinventing itself in an effort to win the affections of the eating-out public.

The managers here might be the greatest humanitarians in history or they might be the greediest and most selfish people on earth. It really doesn’t matter. The market is the driving force and the profitability signals are the test of whether the company is or is not doing the right thing. This is the very heartbeat of the capitalistic process — the one spotted and dissected centuries ago by economists in France, Spain, Italy, and England.
Renovated McDonald’s Interior
“The result is not just a beautiful model for serving up food but a beautiful model for social service in general.”

These old liberals saw that the capitalistic process is the answer to the great social and moral problems raised by thinkers of all ages precisely because it pours every manner of human motivation into the grand project of satisfying the needs and wants of all society’s members. If economic science had one main point to contribute to the world of ideas, this was it.

A most impressive feature of capitalism that is highlighted in the McDonald’s case is how its institutions so beautifully adapt themselves to change. The drift is always upward: new and improved. And this drift is like a wind that never stops blowing unless it is stopped by the organized force of the state….

The addition or removal of the king-consumer from the process of reform amounts to a fundamental change in the whole raison d’être of an institution. It’s true that McDonald’s is not entirely sustained by the market alone, and even overly scrupulous libertarians have jumped on the attack. It’s true that it has been reported that some of its business loans were backed by TARP money after the crisis of 2008, and, of course, it benefits indirectly from subsidies on corn and the like.

By the same token, it is also wickedly punished by the state, paying 30 percent taxes on earnings and shoveling some $2 billion into the federal treasury every year — all money that might otherwise be used for capital upgrades, dividends, or expansions.

The crucial way to tell a predominantly market-based company from a state-based company is to investigate its primary institutional interest: does it serve the state or does it serve the consuming public? There can be no question where McDonald’s is on this spectrum, and the result is not just a beautiful model for serving up food but a beautiful model for social service in general.

McDonald’s is a prime example of how the market has overcome a fundamental human problem: getting enough to eat. This is a problem that vexed the whole of humanity from the beginning of time. Now it appears to be almost entirely solved, thanks to institutions such as McDonald’s, which people feel entitled to criticize and smear because they seem to be such a fixed element in the universe.

(Link)

Reportedly, his girlfriend is “a tad miffed.”

From Hot Air:

If he had a couple of dollars, he’d be living the dream. Michael Kosko, a state worker who passed on the office pool that scored a $319 million Mega Millions jackpot, had the simplest reason for bowing out.

“I didn’t have two singles,” said Michael Kosko, a six-year employee of the Homes and Community Renewal agency in Albany.

“We had played over the past few months, we never hit anything. And I just decided that on that particular day, I wasn’t going to play.”…

“It wasn’t my day,” he said in the understatement of the millennium.

It is, to say the least of it, a very horrifying thing indeed that someone in this position of power actually believes an economic canard of this caliber — a canard that’s been bunked a billion times, and which, in fact, is so easily debunked — and yet it’s even more horrifying to realize that so much of this country’s economic fate is in the hands of one whose economic knowledge is this puerile.

I, for one, was absolutely appalled when I saw the following:

Russell Roberts, professor of economics at George Mason University and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, recently rebutted and demolished Obama’s absurd notions, by pointing out the obvious:

The story goes that Milton Friedman was once taken to see a massive government project somewhere in Asia. Thousands of workers using shovels were building a canal. Friedman was puzzled. Why weren’t there any excavators or any mechanized earth-moving equipment? A government official explained that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman’s response: “Then why not use spoons instead of shovels?”

… Or look at eggs. Today, a couple of workers can manage an egg-laying operation of almost a million chickens laying 240,000,000 eggs a year. How can two people pick up those eggs or feed those chickens or keep them healthy with medication? They can’t. The hen house does the work—it’s really smart. The two workers keep an eye on a highly mechanized, computerized process that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

The savings from higher productivity don’t just go to the owners of the textile factory or the mega hen house who now have lower costs of doing business. Lower costs don’t always mean higher profits. Or not for long. Those lower costs lead to lower prices as businesses compete with each other to appeal to consumers.

… Despite losing millions of jobs to technology and to trade, even in a recession we have more total jobs than we did when the steel and auto and telephone and food industries had a lot more workers and a lot fewer machines.

Why do new jobs get created? When it gets cheaper to make food and clothing, there are more resources and people available to create new products that didn’t exist before. Fifty years ago, the computer industry was tiny. It was able to expand because we no longer had to have so many workers connecting telephone calls. So many job descriptions exist today that didn’t even exist 15 or 20 years ago. That’s only possible when technology makes workers more productive (boldface mine).

(Read the full article here.)

This, incidentally, is another manifestation of Bastiat’s economic law: “What is seen and what is not seen.”

Yes, you’ve read that right.

C’est la vie. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

From Yahoo news:

PORTLAND, Ore. – Call it the big flush.

Because a 21-year-old man was caught on a security camera urinating into a city reservoir, Oregon’s biggest city is sending 8 million gallons of treated drinking water down the drain.

Portland officials defended the decision Monday, saying they didn’t want to send city residents water laced, however infinitesimally, with urine.

Public health officials say, however, that urine is sterile in healthy people and that the urine in the reservoir was so diluted — perhaps a half pint in millions of gallons — that it posed little risk.

Some people in the city, in the suburbs and around the world called the flush an overreaction, especially since animals such as ducks contribute waste routinely and, sometimes, die in the water.

“More than 1 billion people worldwide do not have reliable access to clean drinking water, and here we are tossing away nearly 8 million gallons of water just to appease the ignorant residents who believe their tap water will otherwise turn yellow,” read one comment posted on The Oregonian’s Website.

Water from the city’s five open air reservoirs, all in parks, goes directly to customers. The reservoirs are due to be replaced by underground storage within a decade, a result of federal requirements.

The reservoirs distribute water that flows from glaciers on Mount Hood. It is treated before it goes to the reservoirs for distribution, and then goes directly to consumers.

The reservoirs are drained twice a year for cleaning, and workers have found animal carcasses, paint cans, construction material, fireworks debris and even the plastic bags people use to scoop up after their dogs, said David Shaff, administrator of the city water bureau.

Even so, Shaff said, the yuck factor was the primary reason for the decision to drain the 8 million gallons, at a cost of less than $8,000 to treat it as sewage.

“Nobody wants to drink pee, and I don’t want to deal with the 100 people who would be unhappy that I’m serving them pee in their water,” he said.

Nobody wants to drink pee indeed, sir.

Or do they?

In North Carolina yesterday, meeting with the Council on Jobs and Competiveness, Barack Obama was questioned about the fact that government bureaucracy invariably delays projects and even oftentimes puts a stop to them altogether, to which Obama jokingly replied:

“Shovel-ready was not as — uh — shovel-ready as we expected.”

This clever remark got some pretty good laughs, and I, for one, find it very amusing indeed that these left-wing elitist, among whom Barack Obama is top of the heap, regard their deadly economic philosophy as a kind of joke, which I suppose in one sense it actually is: a complete joke, as a matter of fact, a joke of staggering proportions, a joke about as funny as a cry for help — a joke, in short, that’s nearly as laughable as Obama’s boast that he now “has a better plane” than three years ago, and that he now travels “with a bigger entourage,” while the rest of us pay the price for it.

I imagine, though, that the people who have been out of work for months on end are not laughing nearly as hard as Obama and his clownish administration.

Recall also Barack Obama telling us that his so-called Stimulus had to be passed before it was read because “it would provide for hundreds of thousands of shovel-ready projects that will bring our unemployment rate below 8 percent.”

And yet $821 billion later: “Unemployment is now 25 percent higher than when [Obama] took office, the deficit is 35 percent higher, and gas prices have more than doubled”(source).

Moreover:

“Obama’s stimulus included $28 billion in new highway money, which he said would ‘create or save’ 150,000 jobs by the end of 2010. These are the quintessential ‘shovel-ready’ jobs that Obama jokes turned out to be not so shovel ready.”

From Investors Business Daily:

A new study by economists Timothy Conley of the University of Western Ontario and Bill Dupor of Ohio State found that despite the influx of all that federal money, highway construction jobs actually plunged by nearly 70,000 between 2008 and 2010.

As these authors explain, many states simply took the free federal money and shifted their own highway funds to meet other needs. Examples:

Texas got $700 million in highway stimulus funds last year, but spent $560 million less on its roads in 2010 than it did in 2009.
New York’s highway spending was basically unchanged between 2009 and 2010, despite getting $522 million more in federal highway bucks.
Michigan boosted its highway spending just $17.4 million, far below the $189 million extra the feds handed the state for highway improvements.

And quoting Neal Boortz:

When others, like yours truly, were telling you that MORE government spending on “shovel-ready” projects were not going to be the way to save this nation and grow our economy, you passed the gargantuan bill, continued to pass other bills (like ObamaCare) that increased the size of government and then refused to do anything to actually tackle our entitlement crisis.

According to government figures: When you add up all of the money that we owe in order to cover our future liabilities in entitlements, our country is now in worse financial shape than Greece. Greece! While Obama has nearly doubled our debt to $14.3 trillion, that doesn’t even compare to the $50 trillion that we owe when you include Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Funniest of all, though — at least in my opinion — is the fact that Barack Obama was voted into power by people who, like Obama himself, have no understanding of economics whatsoever but chose him simply because it was the hip trendy thing to do.

Now that’s what I call a hilarious joke.

The Dalai Lama — a nominal voice for platitudes of “peace and compassion,” and whom many regard as a kind of messiah — just recently revealed how unenlightened he actually is, telling a group of Chinese students at the University of Minnesota, that he, the Dalai Lama, is, (and I quote) “a Marxist” — though, he hastened to add, “not a Leninist.”

This, understand, is coming not from a Barack Obama type, who preaches Marxism all while enjoying the benefits and comforts and wealth that capitalism brings, but rather from a man who has experienced firsthand the atrocities of Marxism. It is, when you stop and think about it, an amazing thing. From journalist Tsering Namgyal:

Last week, when the Dalai Lama was in Minneapolis, I had a chance to go to a conference attended by nearly 150 Chinese students. Luckily, I ended up being privy to a fascinating meeting. I sat at the back of the slightly-overheated and jam-packed conference hall of a hotel in downtown Minneapolis, and the Dalai Lama engaged with the students on topics ranging from Mao to Marxism to China-Tibet relations.

… Midway through the conversation, His Holiness, much to their surprise, told them “as far as socio-political beliefs are concerned, I consider myself a Marxist.” “But not a Leninist,” he clarified.

During the question and answer session, a student said that the Marxists these days criticize consumerism because they do not understand the difference between “consumption” and “consumerism.” He also asked about the contradiction inherent in the Dalai Lama’s economic philosophy and Marx’s critique of religion. The Tibetan leader answered that the Marx was not against religion or religious philosophy per se but against religious institutions that were allied, during Marx’s time, with the European ruling class. He also provided an interesting anecdote about his experience with Mao. He said that Mao had felt that the Dalai Lama’s mind was very logical, implying that Buddhist education and training help sharpens the mind. He said he met with Mao several times, and that once, during a meeting in Beijing, the Chinese leader called him in and announced: “Your mind is scientific!”—an assessment that was followed by the famous line, ”religion is poison.”

…Marxism, purported to be the guiding philosophy of the Chinese Community Party, has been replaced by American style capitalism in China. But the author of Das Kapital must be laughing in his grave for gaining new converts in the West, particularly in the academia, following the global financial crisis.

(Link)

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Before joining Cato, he was a special assistant and advisor to the Multi-National Force in Iraq. The following article, which is brief and well-done, appeared June 8th, 2011, on the CATO website:

In the most important appeal of the Obamacare constitutional saga, today was the best day yet for individual freedom. The government’s lawyer, Neal Katyal, spent most of the hearing on the ropes, with the judicial panel extremely cautious not to extend federal power beyond its present outer limits of regulating economic activity that has a substantial aggregate effect on interstate commerce.

As the lawyer representing 26 states against the federal government said, “The whole reason we do this is to protect liberty.” With those words, former solicitor general Paul Clement reached the essence of the Obamacare lawsuits. With apologies to Joe Biden, this is a big deal not because we’re dealing with a huge reorganization of the health care industry, but because our most fundamental first principle is at stake: we limit government power so people can live their lives the way they want.

This legal process is not an academic exercise to map the precise contours of the Commerce Clause or Necessary and Proper Clause — or even to vindicate our commitment to federalism or judicial review. No, all of these worthy endeavors are just means to achieve the goal of maximizing human freedom and flourishing. Indeed, that is the very reason the government exists in the first place.

And the 11th Circuit judges saw that. Countless times, Judges Dubina and Marcus demanded that the government articulate constitutional limiting principles to the power it asserted. And countless times they pointed out that never in history has Congress tried to compel people to engage in commerce as a means of regulating commerce. Even Judge Hull, reputed to be the most liberal member of the panel, conducted a withering cross-examination to establish that the individual mandate didn’t help that many people get affordable care, that the majority of people currently without coverage would be exempt from the requirement (presumably due to their income level).

In short, while we should never read too much into an oral argument, I’m more optimistic about this case now than any other.

Jack Kevorkian, who was born May 26, 1928, died two days ago, at age 83.

In the latter phase of his life, Kevorkian campaigned tirelessly to legalize physician-assisted suicide — a subject about which he was intensely passionate (too passionate, some believed) and even served eight years in prison for “acts of euthanasia.”

From 1990 to 2000, Jack Kevorkian was arrested many, many times for helping more than 100 patients commit suicide. He used injections, carbon monoxide, and his now-infamous “suicide machine,” which he hammered together from scraps for approximately $30.

“Those he aided had terminal conditions such as multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and malignant brain tumors. When asked in a 2010 interview about how it felt to take a patient’s life, Dr. Kevorkian said, ‘I didn’t do it to end a life. I did it to end the suffering the patient’s going through. The patient’s obviously suffering — what’s a doctor supposed to do, turn his back?’

“Dying, he believed, should be an intimate and dignified process, something that many terminally ill people are denied, he said.

“He garnered a fair amount of support from other medical practitioners, although most thought he was an extremist. In 1995, a group of doctors in Michigan publicly voiced their support for Dr. Kevorkian’s philosophy, stating that they supported a ‘merciful, dignified, medically assisted termination of life.’

“Shortly after, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that many doctors in Oregon and Michigan supported some form of physician-assisted suicide in certain cases.

“One of his greatest victories occurred in March 1996 when a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled that mentally competent, terminally ill adults have a constitutional right to die with the aid of medical experts and family members. It was the first federal endorsement of its kind” (source).

Arguably, Jack Kevorkian’s lasting legacy will be in the fact that he (with the invaluable help of his smart and charismatic lawyer Mayer Morganroth) so thoroughly raised the world’s awareness about euthanasia, and I, for one, was a supporter of him: obviously, if we each possess the right to our own life — and we do — we also (therefore) possess the corollary right to end that life when we choose.

Death, where is thy sting?

Jack Kevorkian, MD, jazz musician, oil-painter, euthanasianist: May 26, 1928 – June 3, 2011

June 4th marks the twenty-two year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China. This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force, which is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout the cities of China, including Shanghai. These others remained peaceful, however.

It is not known exactly how many people died altogether in Tiananmen Square, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600, which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

Among the people who died in the Tiananmen Square massacre was a young girl, a student, who worked as a pastry chef in a Dim Sum cafe on the Yangtze. She was the daughter of an engineer. In a country that did not (and does not) permit freedom, she came to understand the principle of individual rights and the inseparable link that exists between property and person — which is to say, economics and politics, or body and brain, all of which amount to the same thing. And that, reader, is no small thing.

This exchange is hilarious and excruciating at the same time: