Earnest Dolts And Selfish Knights

I was tempted to open today's bit with something along the lines of "have you ever known from the outset that an idea was doomed to failure?" I promptly realized we all have, especially in politics, so the obvious amended version is "can you even count the number of times you knew a policy was going to be a disaster before it was enacted?"

Any thinking person will have difficulty tallying those instances, so numerous they are. And, yet, they keep happening. Lawmakers keep passing stupid laws, chasing bad ideas, and refusing to learn from those who screwed up before.

The reason is troubling... disturbing, really... and obvious: Because the act itself, rather than the result, is what gets rewarded.

Behold today's instance. A couple years ago in Washington, DC, the geniuses in charge bent the knee to the earnest, clueless dolts who demanded that the minimum wage for tipped employees (see: restaurant servers, bartenders, etc) be increased substantially. Sure as the sun sets, the impact of this attempt to force restaurants to pay a lot more to people who mostly already make well above the regular minimum wage via tips is not what the fantasizers desired: curtailed operating hours, layoffs, and outright closures.

The restaurant business is a tough one. Successful ones can make their owners a lot of money, but the business model can also drop an investor off a cliff in a shockingly short period of time, and success is always one competitor, one bad day or review or poorly timed inspection, or one shift in public taste from turning to failure. Competition ensures margins are tight, it's brutally hard to keep up with inflation, and the countless non-labor cost inputs keep taking bigger and bigger bites of overall revenue. Tripling the portion of the payroll going to servers is guaranteed to have consequences. Prices will have to go up, and when they do patronage will decrease. As patronage decreases, shifts will be shortened and layoffs will start, proving yet again the time-tested and well-understood effect of raising minimum wages above market rate:

Some benefit while others suffer, and the aggregate is always negative.

That this is the same lesson taught to us about socialism by history and empiricism should come as no surprise.

Nor should anyone be surprised that those who benefit don't give one flying rat's [redacted] about those who suffer. The people who lose their jobs, who have to either find a different line of work or go on the dole, are of no interest to the activists. They blow up the narrative, they interfere with the message, and they sap the dopamine rush received from "we won the fight!" That rush, that good feeling for having "done good," is at the heart of Thomas Sowell's take-down of those he dubs "the anointed" in his 1995 book. Sub-titled "Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy," the book describes exactly what I just referred to: progressive activists do stuff in order to make themselves feel important, and judge their success by accomplishing what they believe to be "better" rather than by actual benefit to those on behalf of whom they white-knight.

This is why the activists never introspect after a "good idea" proves bad. They consider their job done, off to tilt at the next windmill, and it's why bad ideas keep coming back around no matter how often they failed in the past. Shallow thinking and confirmation bias are the norm, and it is the very rare activist who allows negative outcomes to challenge his belief set.

At the core of this persistent self delusion are two other mythical beliefs: that businesses make a lot more money than they actually do, and that behaviors won't change in response to changing rules. These myths persist because, at its core, leftism-progressivism-socialism reinforces selfishness by masking it as altruism.

Scratch the surface of anyone professing preference for that side of the political spectrum and you'll find that all the high rhetoric is a smokescreen for "I want more but want to do less," whether it be personally or transitively. Those who are not only out for themselves (as in "I want my lifestyle underwritten by others") are still selfish in their embrace of "I want better things for others, but I don't want to have to provide those myself." Rather than open a restaurant and pay the wage they want everyone else to pay, rather than walk the walk, they look to force others to pay more. We see this even in billionaires who 'lament' that they don't pay enough in taxes. They never simply cut a check to the United States Treasury. They insist that they be forced to pay more.

I've quoted this so often I made a meme out of it:

Minimum wage laws are just one of a nearly endless list of ideas born of leftist "thought" that never go away no matter how often they fail. No matter how much damage they did. No matter how many lose their jobs or see their hours cut (the true minimum wage is always zero). No matter how many businesses end up shuttering ("if they can't afford to pay it, they don't deserve to stay open).

Make no mistake, the advocates for these sorts of "help the little guy" laws are bad people. They may have the best of intentions, but the deliberate ignorance they embrace when they do what they do must not be excused. Ego and arrogance do not become virtues by doing "good deeds" that every thinking person knows will go wrong.