California Insider

Maviglio reports on an alleged Republican dirty trick that is sending robo-calls purported to be from Democrats and waking people up in the middle of the night just to tick them off.

Brink Lindsey at Cato takes on the growing conventional wisdom that rising inquality is evidence that there is something wrong with the U.S. labor market:

"There is no good reason to think that high earnings for managers and professionals at the top of the pay scale are coming at the expense of everybody else. Firms need workers at various skill levels. Exactly the same incentives guide firms when they are hiring highly skilled workers and when they are hiring less skilled workers. On the one hand, competition will cause them to bid up the price of labor to attract workers away from other job openings; on the other hand, concern with profitability will deter them from overpaying. There isn’t some pot of money in the company safe that’s dedicated to wages and salaries, so that more for some means less for others. Hiring and pay decisions are made at the margin: does adding this worker at this price improve our bottom line? For every new hire, whatever the job description or skill level, firms face strong pressures against either underpaying or overpaying."

And this:

"

Of course you can be disappointed that more people aren’t doing better. In which case, you have a couple of options. Option one is to try to supplement the competitive market system. Let the system work, and accept that the prices it’s generating are offering reasonably accurate information about the economic value of different kinds of work. Then try to find policies that will (a) help people increase their value in the marketplace and (b) mitigate hardships for people with relatively low human capital.

Option two is to try to supplant the system by ignoring market signals and squelching competition. In other words, go against everything we know about how best to encourage innovation and wealth creation. Sure, a lucky minority may get windfalls, but everybody else will suffer from the reduction in economic growth.

Option one is egalitarian liberalism; option two is reactionary collectivism. As a libertarian, I am obliged to point out that perverse incentive effects and political dynamics make it very difficult for option one to work well. But option two is flat out doomed to make matters worse."