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Donald's Blog
October 6, 2014 same old same old Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in his Business World column in the WSJ this week, was on about how Comcast, a big corporation, needs relief from government regulation, and for all I know he's right. But then his rant picks on poor Jimmy Carter, whose presidency unaccountably presided over a wonderful revolution of deregulation of "transportation and energy industries". Oh, that's when we chopped the best telephone company in the world into fifty pieces, and Bell Labs, that invented the transistor, began to disappear. That's probably also when we deregulated airlines, and TWA vanished. Is that when we deregulated electricity, leading to Enron? Maybe that's when we deregulated the Savings & Loans, whereupon many of them were stolen. We need some deregulation, all right. So that the local authority can't tell me that I need to put railings on my ordinary front porch. So that the barber shop doesn't need a full-time employee just to sweep incessantly so that an inspector doesn't find a hair on the floor. Oh, and so that we don't have federal paramilitaries raiding guitar factories. In today's paper the director of a company that runs hundreds of fast-food joints tells us why we don't want a higher minimum wage. How many fast-food joints do we have in any American city, and who would care if half of them closed? And if the people who work in the half that don't close earned a living wage, they'd go out and spend that money, helping to create jobs that don't involve flipping burgers. Most people would agree that Germany, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries are prosperous, with stable economies, as well as plenty of social welfare. Germany, for instance, has strong unions. But English-speaking countries seem to prefer a laissez faire, dog-eat-dog "I've got mine, screw you" type of economy. And that's what we've got, so what's everybody complaining about?
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