except the Donks.  Roger Simon has put forth an AWESOME immigration reform proposal.  A Modest Proposal For Immigration Reform. “Illegal immigrants, assuming they have lived here for a decent period of time and have not committed a felony, can have amnesty, but they can NEVER be allowed to vote. They can do anything else that is legal, but if they want to vote — or run for office or practice law in our country, as just happened in California — they must return home and go through the normal immigrant application process, however long that may take until they have citizenship.”

If the Donks truly "care" they can NOT oppose this.

from Reason.com

Learning to code is the future for today’s emerging labor pool. Even President Barack Obama says so. But more important than learning how to code is learning that it’s illegal for anybody to do anything at all without the permission of the appropriate government agency.

In California, the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) is going after “coding bootcamps,” specialized private code training programs. VentureBeat reports:

These bootcamps have not yet been approved by the BPPE and are therefore being classified as unlicensed postsecondary educational institutions that must seek compliance or be forcibly shut down.

“Our primary goal is not to collect a fine. It is to drive them to comply with the law,” said Russ Heimerich, a spokesperson for BPPE. Heimerich is confident that these companies would lose in court if they attempt to fight BPPE.

...

VentureBeat notes, “The bootcamps fear that they will go bankrupt as regulatory processes can take up to 18 months.”

But we need that oversight as fraud prevention, right? Without the government’s protective regulations, people will be bilked out of their life savings and end up in debt, unlike those students at major public universities who come away with valuable degrees in art history or what have you. Beyond that weak logic, government oversight doesn’t stop private education programs from occasionally failing miserably anyway.

NOT a fan of Matt Yglesias.  Never have been.  I've LONG taught that equality of opportunity does NOT equal equality of outcome.  In real life, no everyone gets a gold colored participation trophy.  But Yglesias and those like him continue to chase a Marxist panicea.  And Slate Magazine recently gave him an outlet to spew his nonsense which may appeal to those ...um ... less introspective among us inan article titled “Sorry, Equal Opportunity Isn’t Good Enough.”

Yglesias was upset at what he considered President Obama's focus on opportunity over inequality in his State of the Union address. Yes, he was hitting Obama from the left. Yglesias complained bitterly that, “Democrats and Republicans may disagree about just about everything, but they both love equal opportunity.” He then offered his thesis:
 

[T]he idea of equal opportunities is a toxic blend of the incoherent and undesirable. It makes no sense whatsoever as a social objective. After all, what would it mean for a society to have equal opportunities?
 

Yglesisas then dug into his imagination to try and visualize what equal opportunity would look like. His first idea was rather cartoonish: he pictured a society in which economic resources were randomly distributed, so that everyone’s chances of becoming rich or poor would be entirely dependent on chance. It was easy for him to knock down that straw man:
 

[A] society of randomly distributed unequal outcomes would be perverse. For one thing, it would be terrible for incentives. Why work hard or hone skills if outcomes are going to be randomized anyway?
 

A good question, Matthew, and it’s one that democratic capitalists might ask of people like you who want equal outcomes. Why work hard or hone skills to try and get ahead if everyone is going to arrive at an equal outcome anyway?

Next, Yglesias pondered an equal-opportunity society in which the “winners” don’t benefit from unfair advantages, such as family connections. He summarized the implications: “So equal opportunities might mean a meritocracy. A society in which the best people succeed.”

And what exactly is wrong with the best people succeeding? Yglesias used the example of long-distance running, which is dominated by East Africans because of their genetic predisposition toward the traits of successful distance runners. He asked his readers:
 

But would we want all of society to look like that? After a couple of generations, a true meritocracy would simply be a society in which the adopted children of the elite fare no better on average than anyone else, but their biological children grow up to be elites themselves. Not because of connections or special favors, but because of their inborn talents.
 

Shouldn’t we celebrate the triumph of inborn talents over connections or special favors, no matter what the person’s background? Also, the example of distance running does not apply to such things as a person’s ability to learn. Any child has the capacity to learn; there is no need for a genetic predisposition. In the absence of any unfair advantages, which was part of Yglesias’ premise, every child should have the same capacity to learn and work toward a better life for themselves and eventually become an “elite.” Such an equal-opportunity society would provide the chance for everyone to improve their situation in life.

Near the end of the piece, Yglesias complained:
 

A perfectly fair race is, in at least one important way, the same as a rigged race: Both have a first-place finisher and a last-place finisher. The question of what happens to the person at the bottom genuinely matters.
 

And yet, Yglesias admitted that the people at the bottom in America have come a long way over time: “Today, even poor people are able to take advantage of things like electricity and antibiotics that were rare or nonexistent 100 years ago. That’s the kind of opportunity that matters—the opportunity for everyone to enjoy a better life.”

Then what is Yglesias complaining about? Our poor in the U.S. are better off than the poor -- and indeed, the middle and upper classes -- in many other parts of the world. If they are enjoying a better life along with everyone else, then perhaps Yglesias’ arguments comes entirely down to his desire to see everyone achieve equal outcomes regardless of whether they have earned it or not.

IF THIS WERE TO CATCH ON, IT COULD SET OFF A REVOLUTION IN JOURNALISM: CNN’s Jake Tapper: Don’t Just Trust the Government, Demand Proof.

I’m predicting, though, that it won’t catch on before January 21, 2017, at the very earliest.

and Jake Tapper Asks Obama If He Was 'Naive' Back In 2008

In the Quote of the Day at Café Hayek, Don Boudreaux highlights Adam Smith Book II, Chapter 1 – on pages 284-285, Vol. 1, of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition – of Adam Smith’s 1776 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in a quote that shows an explicit understanding of what Robert Higgs has labeled Regime Uncertainty, one of the major factors  currently retarding economic recovery.

From Don’s commentary:

In modern commercial economies, enterprising people who are “continually afraid of the violence of their superiors” are victims of what Bob Higgs calls “regime uncertainty.” In response, of course, these people don’t literally bury their wealth as they would have done in more primitive times and as they likely do still in more primitive societies. Instead, they refuse to invest (or they invest much less than they would were their property, and their claims to the fruits of the productive uses of their property, more secure). Enterprise shrinks. Economies stagnate. And the consequent reduction in spending is mistakenly accused of being the cause of these economic woes rather than recognized for what it is: a symptom of a deeper, more ‘real’ problem.

The whole thing is well worth reading and sharing:

Quotation of the Day…

a few short, succinct points from Mises.org.

It would stimulate the economy. If I pay $1 more than necessary to hire a worker, I get $1 less in services for my money. The increase in the workers’ consumption enabled by that $1 is a transfer from me to them, not a net gain.

It would make work more attractive, reducing government dependence. That would require additional jobs became available at a higher wage. However, fewer jobs will be available, so fewer people would be able to work their way out of dependence.

The minimum wage hasn’t “kept up” with inflation since the 1960s. This presumes without justification that the 1960’s minimum wage was economically justified. However, it was a Great Society aberration that coincided with a virtual stop in progress against poverty.

The claim uses the CPI, widely known to overstate inflation, to calculate “real” wages. And the bias was even larger in the past. So going back to the 1960s for comparison mainly introduces a half century of compounded overstatements of inflation to dramatically understate real wage growth.

It would decrease the number of families in poverty. Unfortunately, as labor economist Mark Wilson put it, “evidence from a large number of academic studies suggests that minimum wage increases don’t reduce poverty levels.” One reason is that most minimum wage workers are secondary workers in non-poor households, while very few are heads of households.

Even important businesses endorse raising the minimum wage. Unionized businesses and those who already pay more than the federal minimum gain from raising it, by increasing rivals’ costs. That those employers who would gain at others’ expense endorse a higher minimum wage says nothing about the validity of arguments against it.

A higher minimum wage will pay for itself in higher productivity, lower turnover, employee morale, etc. Every employer who believed that to be true in their circumstances would pay more without needing any mandate. Are those businesses always accused of being too greedy not greedy enough? Further, why do those states with the highest state minimum wages have higher unemployment rates and lower economic growth rates?

Even if some lose their jobs, most low-wage workers will gain from a higher minimum wage. This assumes that other terms of work will remain unchanged, which is false. For those who keep their jobs, fringe benefits, on-the-job training, etc., will fall to offset additional mandated wages. And the increased wages may well be less valuable (as well as taxable) than what is given up, especially on-the-job training that helps people learn their way out of poverty. That is why labor force participation rates fall and quit rates rise when the minimum wage rises, in contrast to what would happen if those workers were made better off.

Supporters of a higher minimum wage claim altruism to help working families as their motive. But it actually harms most of those supposedly be helped, while benefitting supporters by raising costs facing competitors. They may claim, as did the Chairman of Ben & Jerry’s Board, “I support a living wage economically, morally and with deep conviction,” but it is really a self-interested infringement on freedom that is economically stupid and morally abusive.

combining the Left's War on Women with Violence from the Left.:

WashPost's Milbank: Obama Needs 'Cattle Prod' and 'Baseball Bat' to Deal with Republicans

On Tuesday night, Alex Wagner gave the latest example of "if it weren't for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all" (a regular saying of conservative talk show host Chris Plante). The MSNBC host took to Twitter to slam Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers's fireside setting, where she delivered the official Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union: "Living room. Lady on a settee. Where's the needlepoint?"

Conservatives struck back at this condescending attack from one of MSNBC's resident uber-feminists. Townhall.com's Kevin W. Glass pointed out what would have happened if the roles were reversed:

Conservative talker Derek Hunter of Baltimore-area radio station WBAL shot back, "It's an office. Had you had a real job in life you'd recognize one."

Mediaite's Andrew Kirell noticed and wondered, "Curious to know how Wagner would have reacted if someone had said something similar about this Hillary Clinton video."

A reader recently asked me my take on the POTUS threat to nilaterally raisre the min wage paid by gov't contractors.  I opined at the time that imho it was more within the pervue of executive action than many OTHER things he's done or threatened to do, regardless of the ill-advisedness of the action itself. 

Fortunately I'm not alone.  [Eugene Kontorovich] Obama’s minimum wage plan has more statutory authority than prior “unilateral” actions  I LOVE it when the smart people agree with me.

US News gives us the following: THE FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE: An Obama Policy The Tea Party Should Love. “By voluntarily payi…

ng higher prices for some goods and services the federal government procures, without clamoring for new appropriations, Obama is effectively reducing the size of government. Paying prices that are 40 percent higher than before, without the corresponding massive budget expansion, brings down the amount of goods and services acquired by almost 30 percent. And Obama believes this to be a good idea. I am sure that even conservative tea party members who are opposed to most of the president's agenda will welcome this development.

More from the SOTU.

But the debate is settled.  Climate change is a fact.

To that, I say this:

There’s never been any assertion that climate didn’t change, the idea that somehow this is something new to the 21st century is absurd.  The QUESTION, upon which the science is NOT settled is whether and to what extent is CURRENT climatre change man-made.

I am reminded of te words of the great (?) scientist Lord Kelvin who reportedly said in 1900*

“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement”.

* This quote is reputed to be Kelvin’s remark made in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1900). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin#Pronouncements_later_proven_to_be_false

Equally preposterous (now) is this statement from Kelvin:

In 1898, Kelvin predicted that only 400 years of oxygen supply remained on the planet, due to the rate of burning combustibles.^[62][63] In his calculation, Kelvin assumed that photosynthesis was the only source of free oxygen; he did not know all of the components of the oxygen cycle. He could not even have known all of the sources of photosynthesis: for example the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus—which accounts for more than half of marine photosynthesis—was not discovered until 1986.

Kelvin’s pronouncement, which he believed to be true at the time based on the facts he had at hand, were later disproved by new science and obviously discarded. But, imagine if there were a panic movement then to conserve oxygen, with “oxygen taxes” applied, massive government funded research implemented, and reams of NGO’s feeding on the frenzy demanding a host of new laws and changes in human behavior to avert the crisis.

They’d look pretty stupid to us in the context of science knowledge today, wouldn’t they?