Evergrande is — or was — the second-largest real estate company in China. A couple years ago, it was the world's most valuable real estate stock. It's also been involved in an eclectic mix of other businesses, from mineral water to electric cars to pig farming. It even owns a professional soccer team. But recently it's been having a really hard time repaying a mammoth amount of debt, a whopping $300 billion worth.

The Evergrande story is bigger than just one company. It's about China's unsustainable model of economic growth, which has relied on endless investment and a mad, debt-fueled development frenzy in recent years. That model helped China soar, but the country is now experiencing some turbulence.

in 1931, Hayek crititicized John Maynard Keynes's Treatise on Money (1930) in his "Reflections on the pure theory of Mr. J.M. Keynes"[124] and published his lectures at the LSE in book form as Prices and Production.[125] For Keynes, unemployment and idle resources are caused by a lack of effective demand, but for Hayek they stem from a previous unsustainable episode of easy money and artificially low interest rates.

As the driving force behind the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), “the granddaddy of libertarian think tanks,” Leonard Read faced decades of “what would markets do to solve this problem” challenges when pointing out any of the many inadequacies of government’s coercive organization of society. Since those challenges still haunt believers in liberty, it is worth considering his answer, which runs from what we don’t know to what we do. And his justifiably famous “I, Pencil,” is right in the middle of things.

The beginning of Read’s answer came in “I Don’t Know,” in his The Free Market and Its Enemy (1965), which deals with how to successfully advocate for “the free market and its miraculous performances” in the face of such challenges:

Skeptics of the free market are forever asking, “Well, how would the free market attend to mail delivery? Education? Or, whatever?”

[Unfortunately] a person can no more explain how the free market would attend to mail delivery than his great-grandfather could have explained how television could ever emerge from free market forces!

Answer honestly: I don’t know; I never will know; no one will ever know.

In other words, Read recognized that the attempt to answer the inherently unanswerable was futile. But there was a better way, using what is, in fact, knowable. And that is where “I, pencil,” which reveals the large number of market miracles that go into even something as simple as a pencil, comes in: //

However, the innumerable market miracles all around us, none of which any of us could have correctly predicted in advance, provide us with overwhelming proof of the power of liberty. Free men and women can do not only great but unimaginable things when they own themselves and can make whatever peaceful arrangements they voluntarily choose.

There is also a useful contrast between freedom, challenged to prove itself in advance before many will even consider it, and government, unable to prove itself in action despite the power to force us to follow its lead. No government representative or bureaucrat can meet the burden of proof demanded of freedom.

And unlike defenders of self-ownership and the market behavior that arises from it, which has produced uncountable successes without theft, there is no massive list of dramatic life-improving “success stories” created by government. But that is unsurprising. As Read put it, “How can frustration be manipulated into harmony and increased production? Can any interference with peaceful, willing exchange, regardless of who does the interfering, do other than wreak havoc?”

Avatar
Tennessee_Tech
6 hours ago
So let's make this simple for people..

1) You make stuff or provide a service that people want, can pay for, and within your reach of delivery.
2) You charge them for the price that they are willing to pay and you are willing to accept.

This has nothing to do with your failures or the cost to develop something, only the value of the transaction to them.

Consequences of this reality..
1) You provide a product or service that people don't want or aren't willing to pay what it costs you to provide and you go out of business. e.g. Blockbuster
2) You make enough mistakes / failures on products, services, etc.. and you aren't in business any longer.

So let's talk about when we start making exceptions.. And the implications..
S1) We need drugs, semiconductors, cars, steel, etc.. produced here so we aren't dependent on China, India, etc..
R1) We do need certain things securely and properly produced in country, even regionally. So reduction of regulation, market driven wages / benefits, etcetera are how you encourage (not make) that happen.

Government intervention / regulation / subsidies are "soft" fascism..

https://www.econlib.org/lib...
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions

Do you know what happens when you raise taxes by almost $100 billion on oil and gas companies while we are already in the midst of a cost explosion? The price of energy, whether gasoline or electricity, skyrockets even more. Does that sound like something that’s going to help out the middle class? And how exactly is that part of a “build back better” agenda? //

Ask yourself who uses the most gasoline in this country. The answer is truck drivers, construction workers, delivery drivers, home-health nurses, and a variety of other blue-collar professions. Meanwhile, those who use the least gasoline are wine-sipping liberals in urban enclaves that take the subway or ride a bike to work. In other words, what Biden is proposing is just another payoff to his chosen demographic of far-left ideologues. //

scgrl625
6 hours ago
Let's break this down. So, he charges $90 billion to the gas companies. That amount would trickle down to consumers, and as mentioned in the above article, would mean the American people and the trucking industry, which would trickle down to food prices being basically unaffordable, which would trickle down to families needing to be on government assistance.

Got it.

Speaking at a recent CAPA Live event, Executive Chairman of Air Lease Corporation (ALC) Steve Udvar-Hazy commented on the impact that COVID has had on the industry. //

“The airline industry as a whole on a global level has lost everything they’ve earned since World War II. I mean, everything, all the profits that were hard-earned are gone.

“If it was not for government support, either in the forms of guarantees, equity, loans, all kinds of medicine government agencies have put forth, the airline industry would have been crippled.” //

IATA estimates that the industry’s debt burden as a whole has ballooned by $220 billion to a total of $651 billion. //

“The balance sheets of airlines today compared to where they were, say, 18 months ago is vastly different. And many, many airlines have mortgaged everything, their planes, their slots, their airport terminals, their ground facilities, their frequent flyer programs. They’ve borrowed against every possible asset or even virtual assets that they don’t even have.” //

“At the end of last year, we crossed that threshold where more than 50% of the aircraft are leased, either on an operating lease or a finance lease or on a sale-leaseback. That is a huge change from where we were even five years ago,” said the ALC boss.

Biden’s new budget proposal, intended to fund the American Families Plan, contains two intense tax increases, including estate and capital gains, which could reach up to 61 percent.

Not to mention the charts show when a lot of the prices started soaring — strange how you can trace a lot of them to starting to go up after the end of January. I wonder what was happening then?

Now, of course, if President Donald Trump were in office, Krugman would be screaming his head off about how we were heading for the dumpster because of this. But now, under Biden, “not a big deal” and “transitory blip.”

If we apply our basic principle about Krugman being wrong, then unfortunately that means we may need to start worrying.

Turning waste plastic into fuel isn’t a new idea. Many researchers have achieved it through a process called pyrolysis, which involves heating plastic to between 300º C and 900º C in an oxygen-free environment. This breaks the substance down into fuel, along with some additional chemicals. Hongfei Lin, associate professor with The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at WSU, thinks that he and his team have discovered a way to make the process more efficient and environmentally friendly. //

Pyrolysis is an old technology, Rollinson told Ars. It was used to make things like creosote and methanol from wood, prior to the widespread use of petrochemicals, he said. Since the 1950s, attempts have been made to use the process on plastics. So far, it has not worked out, according to Rollinson.

Though the paper says the process is high-efficiency, it’s likely not, Rollinson says, as it requires a good deal of hydrogen pressure. Reaching the necessary pressure requires a lot of energy. Making and storing hydrogen also takes a lot of energy, reducing any green benefits. He said that the experiment was only in a laboratory setting. It would require a far greater amount of hydrogen and energy to pressurize it, if introduced at a commercial scale.

Further, Rollinson noted that the catalyst and solvents used would also need to be scaled up for larger amounts of plastics. Hexane, the solvent, is toxic, explosive, and environmentally harmful if released into the wild, he added. There’s also an energy input in the process of making these chemicals. In an email to Ars, Lin acknowledged that solvent recovery and reuse would add costs, but the technology itself would work to keep costs low. All the same, Rollinson has his doubts.

“No way it’s a go-er at all,” he said. “For science’s sake, it’s quite interesting. But as a practical answer to plastic … it’s not workable.” //

RindanArs Tribunus Militumet Subscriptorreply2 days agoignore user
SharpieFiend wrote:
If we want to reduce the amount of oil that gets pumped out of the ground then something needs to be done about jet fuel - it's a major demand driver. Even if the process is less efficient than refining crude it can still be worth while.

Sure, but why "recycle"? We know how to make jet fuel. We can make fossil fuels with no problem. The Germans were doing it during World War II when they couldn't important gas, and we have surely only gotten better at the process. There is a reason why we don't do this though; it isn't worth the cost. The amount of energy you have to dump in isn't worth it. It's like using electrolysis for to get hydrogen. Yeah, you can technically do that, you just have to accept a massive loss of energy and cost. The process that we end up using for carbon neutral jet fuel is going to end up being whatever is cheapest at scale, and we are only going to use that once the cost of jet fuel rises so that it

We don't need to recycle things into jet fuel; we need a process that is scalable and the least energy intensive possible. If starting from a plastic component gets us there, great, but recycling shouldn't be the goal, just a happy side effect if that's the path that ends up being the cheapest. I'm skeptical that this is the cheapest. We are far better off to bury our plastic in the ground and then make carbon neutral jet fuel, then to spend extra energy to recycle plastic into jet fuel. Plastic in a landfill isn't hurting anyone. Using a bunch of energy on the other hand, especially with our current electricity mix, is definitely hurting someone.

Maybe I'm being too skeptical, but this seems like a gimmick to me. We don't need to recycle plastic into jet fuel, we need jet fuel, and maybe if someone can find something energetically worthwhile, a separate method of recycling plastic. It's okay if those are two independent and completely different steps, especially if it takes less energy. //

WickwickArs Legatus Legionisreply2 days agoReader Favignore user
I wish people would get off the idea that high-temperature processes must be low-efficiency. There's nothing that says one cannot have heat exchangers used to preheat products headed to the pyrolysis chamber. This isn't a combustion cycle. There's no requirement to reject heat to the environment to make it work.

The only thermodynamic limit is that the fuel probably has lower entropy than the plastic (though that's not a given). If it does, you have to invest in some amount of energy to execute that conversion.

In an interview in 2018, the economist Thomas Sowell had a concise answer when podcaster and commentator Dave Rubin asked what awakened him to the failures of Marxism, an ideology he had espoused in his youth.

“Facts!” Sowell replied.

In his decadeslong career, Sowell’s commitment to the facts at the expense of popular approval and, sometimes, career advancement has captured audiences young and old, black and white, rich and poor.

But Sowell isn’t much concerned with his fame, even if it is an encouraging indicator of how well his ideas have been received. //

To be a conservative who is black is to expose oneself to undue amounts of absurd criticism, and Sowell’s experience was no exception.

Riley writes that Sowell and the late economist Walter Williams, a protegee and friend of Sowell’s, used to joke that “they never flew together, because if the plane went down there would be no black conservatives left.”

But Sowell had “felt the pain and humiliation of racism firsthand throughout his life,” and “needed no lectures from anyone on the evils of Jim Crow,” Riley writes.

For instance, many claimed that Sowell’s book “Ethnic America: A History” argued that discrimination against blacks did not exist. But Sowell actually was arguing that “discrimination alone was an insufficient explanation of social inequality.”

Sowell, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution since 1980, certainly was not a pawn of white economists, even the ones he admired and learned from.

Milton Friedman, a friend and mentor, said that Sowell “has a mind of his own, insists on making it up for himself, and on getting the evidence necessary to form a valid judgment.” In fact, Sowell saw his views on racial matters as entirely in line with that of black civil rights leaders of the past.

“If anything,” Riley writes, “Sowell’s analyses are in the tradition of his fellow black forebearers, not his white contemporaries.” Black leaders of the past such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, he writes, “shared Sowell’s deep skepticism of government benevolence and the lowering of standards to facilitate black advancement.”

In the longer term scrap metal might have a more material role in China’s steel industry – China wants to double production from its electric arc furnaces over the next four or five years – but its ambitions will have only modest impacts on its demand for iron ore and iron ore prices in the medium term.

Along with a crackdown on iron ore futures trading last week – the authorities vowed to punish market manipulation – the actions helped slightly lower the iron ore price, from more than $US230 a tonne to around $US210 a tonne. Iron ore started this year priced at less than $US160 a tonne, having traded down to around $US60 a tonne just over a year ago.

China’s reliance on Australian iron ore for almost two-thirds of its steel industry’s requirements and Vale’s continuing struggles to restore production after its tailing dam disasters and pandemic-related disruptions in Brazil means there is little it can do to curtail purchases of Australian iron ore without hurting its steel industry and economy.

Even if it can develop new sources of supply, with the giant Simandou resource in Guinea the most obvious, they would be higher-cost (development of the infrastructure for Simandou could cost the best part of $US20 billion), are nearly a decade away and would in any event probably represent only about 10 per cent of China’s existing demand.

The government report on inflation has been released, and it’s not good. Inflation hit 4.2% in April, a crushing blow to the poor and middle class especially. This followed on the heels of stagnating hiring shown by last week’s jobs report (see New Jobs Report Is the Worst Miss in History as Biden Administration Failures Mount). //

Remember, the consumer price index doesn’t even include things like lumber so this number is likely lower than reality despite still showing an out-of-control rise. That rise is directly timed with Biden passing his COVID “relief” act that printed trillions of largely unnecessary dollars. //

This is the result of Democrat economic policies. We tried to warn the cocktail-sipping establishment class that thought Trump was too icky. Policies have consequences, and they matter a lot more than mean tweets and disagreements about rhetoric. Real people are now getting smoked while Joe Biden is nowhere to be found (see We Don’t Have a President).

Of course, you can expect the media to spin this.

Paul Krugman
@paulkrugman
So, the inflation report wasn't a nothingburger, but it was sort of a White Castle slider — not a very big deal. //

These people live in a bubble, and they aren’t going to leave it. They truly believe you don’t matter. Vote accordingly.

In response to Whitmer’s imperialistic order, Enbridge told her to pound sand, saying the oil will keep flowing regardless of her demands because the two sides are still in the middle of court-ordered mediation.

But Whitmer doesn’t care. Her quest to please her climate-change-gods takes precedence over the needs of her residents and the residents of other states which will inevitably suffer as a result of her decision. Though Line 5 has previously had issues with small leaks, those leaks have amounted to just 1.1 million gallons leaked over 29 leak incidents, over the last 53 years. While 1.1 million gallons may seem like a lot, it amounts to 56 gallons a day, less than 5% of the total oil that is pumped through the line in just one day, or just 0.0002% of the 446 Billion gallons of oil that has pumped through the line since 1968. If I were running a business and my safety and prevention efforts resulted in a 99.9998% success rate, I’d be asking for a raise.

That doesn’t stop the fearmongering left. Their stupidity in practice means we shut down those oil pipelines, leading to shortages, stagnation of the economy (or outright economic collapse), further victimization of America’s poverty-stricken population, and of course, a significant rise in carbon pollution as the transportation of those oil resources is moved to truck and diesel pushing trains. Of course, Whitmer and her team of “experts,” don’t factor for any of these issues in the fancy reports. To them, the reduction of the consumption of carbon-producing fuels is worth it. Your immediate physical and mental health matters not to them. Neither does your financial situation or your ability to provide for your family. It all can be sacrificed at the altar of “good intentions” as the left continues the worship of their climate change gods. To them, your health, freedom, and happiness are expendable as long as they feel like they are doing the will of their progressive agenda.

But hey, I’ve got some good news – there’s not a mean tweet to be seen.

Donald Trump has been reduced to releasing written statements that get users banned if they share them, and isn’t that truly enough to get us through these tough times? I mean, sure, your savings are evaporating due to inflation, you can’t afford to gas your car up, your grocery bill has exploded, and the Middle East is on fire again, but the decorum we are currently experiencing is just invigorating, right?

All of this was preventable, but shallow, cocktail circuit dwellers in the beltway thought it better to promote a “return to normalcy” that has been anything but. Joe Biden’s administration isn’t even six months old and it’s already an abject disaster. Actually, we’d be lucky to just end up with Jimmy Carter’s second term at this point. //

RescueMe
an hour ago
"A three-legged dog could have been elected president in 2020 and done a better job with the economy than Biden"

I'm still waiting for the media to wake up to the reality of our current situation. The Barrack Obama via Susan Rice / Biden administration isn't doing a "bad job." They are skillfully executing a plan to destroy the republic.

• Demoralize the military - purge the patriots.
• Demoralize the CIA - hire based on wokeness not actual qualification and patriots retire in frustration.
• Turn the FBI into a political prosecution machine when they're not being used as wheelmen for white collar crimes.
• Open the border and invite the entire world into our social safety net.
• Pay people to stay away from work until small businesses collapse.
• Spend the country into oblivion... Cloward - Piven.

Does anyone see how intentional this is? This is not a failing or bungling administration and until we stop ascribing their performance to idiocy we're not addressing what is actually happening before our eyes.

With news on the disappointing April jobs report out of the way, the crew at CNS News did some digging and found some pretty fantastical, pre-jobs report headlines from mainstream media news outlets that were difficult to distinguish from an official White House press release. Here’s what they found: //

G6095
an hour ago
The real problem is not the headline writers, liars that they are, it's the, shall I say lack of intelligence, of the vast majority of readers who invest the sum total of their information gathering in headline reading. //

mlmorrison44
14 hours ago
So it's all up from here. As soon as jobs hit 500K they will be saying how Biden doubled growth. //

Skeptical Techie
11 hours ago edited
Love how that last guy absolutely steps on the guy who is reading out the whole point of the segment and then starts shouting out about other stats and oohing and ahing about them.

Look over here!

At the end he oohs about the Workforce Participation of 61.7%...? What? That is STILL WORSE than before all the economic pandemic hitting the world February 2020! We are still in the hole and he is shouting, "Yes, yes, yes, look at that, we are IN THE HOLE!"

Witnesses are gathering upon the scene where a woman has been crushed, dragged, disemboweled, dismembered and killed by a city trolley and a guy from the City's PR firm is shouting, "Hey look over here, she was just given a chrome engagement ring. Isn't it shiny?"

Breaking911
@Breaking911
JUST IN: The U.S. economy added 266,000 jobs in April, far below the Wall Street consensus of 978,000; unemployment rate 6.1% - Reuters
8:43 AM · May 7, 2021

Mike Berg
@MikeKBerg
The April jobs report was so bad @CNBC had to double check the number to make sure they read it correctly.

Jeff Stein
@JStein_WaPo
The White House believes today's job reports illustrates the importance of providing robust unemployment support with millions of Americans still out of work, a senior administration official says
10:15 AM · May 7, 2021

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who frankly are getting what they paid for (they gave huge contributions to the Biden for President campaign), had the nerve to weigh in:

U.S. Chamber
@USChamber
“The disappointing jobs report makes it clear that paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market."

See the full statement from our EVP @NeilBradleyDC on this morning's @BLS_gov jobs report: https://bit.ly/3h98rbF

Jen O'Brien
@JenOBrien2
I work with small businesses. We’re open for biz since June. They can’t get people to work although they offer well above minimum wage. Many have had to reduce hours b/c of lack of staff. Now small biz is suffering b/c of perceived poor svc. Fed Govt is destroying small biz. //

This is not building anything back; it’s the slippery slope of an economic depression. What’s more, it’s a deliberate effort to tank the economy’s engine: small businesses and entrepreneurs. The U.S. Department of Labor Secretary actively attacking independent professionals, freelancers, and entrepreneurs is further confirmation that the Biden administration wants you dependent on government, not on your ingenuity and your ability to earn, grow, and build an enterprise. //

Eric Bott
@BottAFP
How is this surprising to anybody? The government is paying people to not work. What did they expect to happen?
10:28 AM · May 7, 2021

david spratt
@Oil_vampire
Worst take of the day @CNBC
" There's a labor shortage & labor demand shortage."

Neither is true, there's plenty of labor & demand, there's a people willing to work shortage
10:13 AM · May 7, 2021

As I wrote early last year:

If any profession represents the independent spirit, grit, and ingenuity that helped forge America, it is that of the Trucker. Truckers are the American Dream personified, and are representative of the family business and passing down a legacy. But today, California truckers are engaged in a pitched battle against the state’s AB5 law, a piece of legislation that threatens to do away with their way of life. //

Now, Californians can look forward to higher food prices because of all those “union” rates and protections being tacked on, as well as the limited supply of highly skilled truckers. Don’t be surprised if more grocery chains start to shutter their stores, //

Hardest hit: construction. Expect it to become more expensive, and move at an even more glacial pace. //

clconnett
3 hours ago
I'm hearing the sound of California's ports contracting from the east coast. You think construction will be hard hit? You have any idea how many trucks move through the ports every day?

The term “monopoly rent” might be jargon, but the concept it describes is intuitive. Don’t underestimate the power of a simple argument. Google’s and Apple’s alleged rent-collecting days might be numbered.

The greatest threat the digital yuan poses to the United States is that it endangers the international financial system America has led since World War II. //

Communist China became the first major economy to create a government-sanctioned digital currency — digital yuan. Such a move will significantly impact the great power competition between the United States and China and may reshape the dollar-dominated global financial structure forever.

When Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party General Secretary, talked about returning China to a world superpower status, he always envisioned China’s currency (the yuan) would achieve a global reserve currency status akin to what the U.S. dollar has enjoyed since the end of World War II. //

Yet, despite the Chinese government’s relentless efforts, the Chinese yuan currently accounts for only 2 percent of global foreign exchange reserve assets while the dollar’s dominance remains unchallenged. Close to 90 percent of foreign-exchange transactions entail U.S. dollars, and more than 60 percent of all global central-bank reserves are held in dollar-denominated assets. China’s digital yuan, however, presents a challenge. //

The biggest threat the digital yuan poses to the United States is that it presents an alternative to the existing international financial system America has led for two generations. Individuals under U.S. sanctions will avoid suffering any financial pain by using digital yuan to access their assets thus rendering typical economic sanctions toothless.

America’s adversaries, such as North Korea, Iran, and Russia, will likely use digital yuan to exchange money, settle trades, and engage in weapon sales or other illicit activities. Doing so will enable them to bypass the existing financial system entirely, meaning American intelligence agencies won’t be able to monitor such activities and hurting the ability of the United States and its allies to anticipate potential threats before they metastasize. //

There are at least three things the United States should be doing in responding to the digital yuan. First, the Security and Exchange Commission should approve the existing requests to launch exchange-traded funds focusing on cryptocurrencies. Such funds will bring an inflow of fresh capital, stimulate the development of digital currencies and digital assets, and make them more accessible to the general public.

Second, the Fed should consider accepting some of these well-established cryptocurrencies into the U.S. financial system. Some well-known businesses such as Tesla and the Dallas Mavericks basketball team have already announced they would accept specific cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or dogecoin as an alternative means of payment. As more businesses embrace digital currencies every week, the Fed may ultimately not have much choice but to adopt at least some type of digital currencies. If that’s likely to be the case, it’s better to do so now rather than later.

Finally, the Fed can issue a digital dollar as long as there are sufficient privacy protections in place to prevent some ambitious politicians from using the digital currency the way the CCP does as a means to control the American people.
Competition produces better goods and services at lower prices. The more free-market choices of digital currencies we can offer, the less likely China’s digital yuan will replace the U.S. dollar and gain international dominance as the CCP intended.

'Dirty Jobs' and 'Six Degrees' host Mike Rowe is correct about the negative economic and social effects of the minimum wage.

Over the weekend, while promoting his new Discovery Channel show “Six Degrees,” Mike Rowe shared some thoughts on the push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Appearing on Fox Business, the former “Dirty Jobs” star said he wants “everybody who works hard and plays fair to prosper.”

As the host, executive producer, and creator of “Six Degrees,” which focuses on the interconnectedness of the world throughout history, Rowe added:

I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you’re going to create other problems, like there is a ladder of success that people climb and some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they’re simply not intended to be careers. They’re not intended to be full-time jobs. They’re rungs on a ladder. //

Rowe’s 2013 “S.W.E.A.T. Pledge” (Skill & Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo) //

Reading now over Rowe’s S.W.E.A.T. pledge, I see I followed it. It wasn’t a pledge “to gratuitous abuse and disenfranchisement.” What Johnson, who mocked the pledge as “bourgeois propaganda” marketing “very basic human needs” misses, is that hard, honest work genuinely satisfies basic human needs. Indeed, that five-cent raise I earned at 14 still brings me more pride than most of my later white-collar job achievements.

My story is not an isolated one, but I also recognize it is not universal, which is why policy and policy debates should not focus on the anecdotal but the reality of economics and unintended consequences. Rowe raised those points, and he is correct.

Minimum-wage jobs are rungs, and if the government offers an “artificially high wage for unskilled jobs,” it takes away the incentives for “more people to learn a skill that’s actually in demand” and are careers that do support families. That reality is no less true just because Rowe once sang opera.