California is legendary for its protection of unionized teachers. But if a new measure makes it onto the November ballot, voters would decide whether California teachers would have to bank on more than seniority to keep their jobs.

Matt David of StudentsFirst submitted the measure to the Secretary of State last month, where it’s awaiting a title and a summary before signatures can be gathered. The issue of teacher seniority remains a contentious issue in California. School districts have laid off more than 30,000 full-time teachers since 2007-08, largely based on who was hired last, not how well those teachers performed. Last year the Legislative Analyst’s Office reported that the “state values seniority in the layoff process.” Specifically:

Current law requires that districts lay off teachers in inverse seniority order. …basing employment decisions on the number of years served instead of teachers’ performance can lead to lower quality of the overall teacher workforce. California also is different than many other states—the majority do not prescribe seniority–based layoffs but rather allow school districts themselves to decide how to lay off their staff. …we recommend exploring statewide alternatives that could provide districts with the discretion to do what is in the best interest of their students. Ideally districts would use multiple factors in making layoff determinations. …[such as] student performance, teacher quality, and contributions to school community.

While many good teachers are likely being pink-slipped under California’s last-hired-first-fired policy, teachers accused of sexual offenses against students remain on the job and on the taxpayer payroll. As drafted, the proposed ballot measure make it easier to fire such teachers.

Improving the quality of California’s teaching workforce starts with sensible hiring and firing policies. This ballot measure will certainly be worth watching.

Pope Francis recently urged all people to have greater compassion for the poor. And to his credit he emphasized the moral imperative of helping to reduce poverty around the world. Unfortunately, the approach advocated by Francis would result in more human suffering, not less.

In his strongly worded apostolic exhortation “Evangelii gaudium” or “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis blamed capitalism, which he sees as essentially a zero-sum system, for much of the world’s poverty:

Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Francis believes that under a capitalistic system people get wealthier by feeding “upon the powerless.” The rich get richer by making the poor poorer. His solution, therefore, is to redistribute money from the rich to the poor:

I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs.”

I recently discussed Peter Schweizer’s book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets.  I want to mention one example from Schweizer’s book, to give a better idea of how this extortion occurs.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), passed in 1977, prohibits US companies from bribing foreign government officials, but Schweizer notes that the law is ambiguously written and inconsistently enforced.  This opens the door for extortion, and Schweizer (p. 130) argues that companies that help politicians with fund-raising are less likely to find themselves investigated and prosecuted for FCPA violations.

Schweizer quotes a Duke University law professor (p. 147) who says, “The nature of contemporary federal criminal law magnifies the potential for mischief, because the definitions of the relevant offenses are both broad and vague, giving the prosecutors extraordinarily wide discretion on which there are few checks.”

Schweizer notes that while FCPA applies to payments to foreign governments, members of the US Congress ask firms for financial contributions all the time, as a condition for either getting legislation to pass, or stopping the passage of legislation that would harm the firms.  That is a main theme of his book.

Schweizer (p. 149) quotes a former president of Shell Oil who says, “The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act basically says you can’t give gifts to foreign government officials — which includes campaign contributions and donations to certain charities.  Of course, that’s what we get asked to do all the time from Washington.  Why doesn’t the FCPA cover Washington?”

The obvious answer is that these corrupt practices that are illegal for US corporations to engage in overseas benefit the Permanent Political Class when they take place in Washington.  What’s illegal overseas is almost mandatory in Washington because the people who write the laws benefit from that arrangement.

How absurd can a law be, to force nuns (who have taken vows of both poverty and celibacy) to explain to the state why they don’t want to pay for contraception? That requirement was too much for Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who issued a temporary injunction against Obamacare’s mandate that health plans must cover contraception.

I am not sure it is possible to describe all the absurdity of the contraceptive issue in a few hundred words. And I do mean “all,” because some of the law’s opponents are engaged in a disproportionate response to the contraceptive mandate.

But first, the law itself. As a religiously affiliated organization, the Little Sisters of the Poor is exempt from the mandate. However, the law requires the order to file paperwork to that effect with the third-party administrator (TPA) of their health plan. They cannot just pay for a health plan that does not cover contraceptives without a co-pay.

Perhaps this bureaucratic burden is a fraud-prevention technique. There may be groups of lascivious atheists who plan to dodge the contraceptive mandate by dressing in black habits, registering as non-profit religiously affiliated monastic orders, and praying most of their waking hours. But I very much doubt it.

A number of years ago, Governor Romney told me that under Massachusetts health reform people would go to physicians’ offices for care instead of going to the emergency room. He wasn’t saying that Massachusetts would deliver more care. He was saying that the care would be more appropriate and less expensive.

As it turns out he was wrong. Traffic to the ER in Massachusetts today is higher than it was before the state’s health reform was enacted.

The same argument has been used by President Obama and by supporters of the Affordable Care Act. And now it turns out they are wrong too. As the New York Times reports:

The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made 40 percent more visits to the emergency room than their uninsured counterparts during their first 18 months with insurance.

This is consistent with our own predictions in an NCPA study done soon after the ACA was passed. Ah, if only they had listened.

* * *

For the pivotal alternative to Obamacare, please see the Independent Institute’s widely acclaimed book: Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, by John C. Goodman.

[Cross-posted at Psychology Today and John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog]

The notion that everyone must have health insurance to acquire medical care has reached such a level of obsession that it almost deserves its own entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the guidebook for mental illness that has grown so bloated with diagnoses that even the National Institute of Mental Health withdrew its support this year).

Imagine if you showed up at a party late on a rainy evening and your friends asked you why you were delayed. “I had to stop to replace my windshield wipers,” you answer. “What car insurance do you have?” they reply. “What does that matter? I didn’t have an accident on the way here. The new wipers worked fine and I saw the road clearly.”

There follows a general wailing and lamentation that the new wipers are “preventive care” and should therefore be “free”; that you will likely go bankrupt if you have to pay out of pocket to keep your car running; and the government needs to do something to guarantee that nobody has to buy their own windshield wipers.

You would certainly think that your friends needed some help with their mental processes. But, of course, they are not mentally ill. They simply have a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of insurance in health care. Like most Americans, they need to be introduced to a correct understanding.

For that, they would be well advised to consult D. Eric Schansberg’s “The Economics of Health Care and Health Insurance” in the latest issue of The Independent Review, vol. 18, no. 3 (Winter 2014), pp. 401-420. Schansberg reviews a significant number studies, which show that when preventive care is insured, it tends to be over consumed. This increases health spending, despite what politicians like President Obama claim.

Millennials, already disproportionately suffering under the enduring Great Recession, likely have a bleak 2014 in store.

Millennials suffer unemployment rates 50% higher than their elders. When you add in those working part-time while looking for full-time work, that already-high figure doubles. And half of last year’s college graduates work in jobs that don’t require a degree.

With the first few years out of college crucial to establishing the course for one’s entire career, Millennials face the very real prospect of being a “lost generation”—never overcoming this early handicap.

The roll-out of ObamaCare “piles on,” disproportionately burdening the young and healthy with the higher healthcare costs of the older and sicker. Our 29-year-old son—who became self-employed after his architecture career was killed off by the bursting of the federally-induced housing bubble—saw his health insurance premiums double this fall. Will his animal-care clients accept double fees for dog-walks, boarding, and training?

And now Mr. Obama is promising a higher minimum wage, the fall-out from which will, again, disproportionately hurt the young:

Economist David Neumark, an expert on minimum-wage economic studies, says that an economic rule-of-thumb is that every 10% increase in the minimum wage reduces teen employment by about 1% to 3%. In October the U.S. teen jobless rate was 22.2% and for black teens it was 36%. The Obama minimum wage combined with the health mandate could mean up to a 10% reduction in jobs for the poor and young.

I’ve just finished reading Peter Schweizer’s book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets.  It is solidly researched and loaded with facts to back up Schweizer’s claim that Washington politicians are extorting money from Americans for their own benefit.

Political “contributions,” Schweizer notes, are often viewed as bribes given to politicians in exchange for favorable treatment.  In fact, these transfers of funds are more typically demanded by politicians, either in exchange for legislative, regulatory, or other benefits, or in an attempt by the payee to avoid being harmed by some government action.

Bribery and extortion look similar, the difference being who initiates the transaction.  Schweizer argues that as politics has evolved in Washington, it is the “permanent political class” who demands payment for the services they provide.

The book is filled with specific examples of cases where legislation is held up until those who favor the legislation pay a sufficient amount to the  campaigns or PACs of legislators who then will move it to a vote.  More perniciously, legislation is often designed to harm specific groups, who then are strong-armed into paying up to stop the legislation from going forward.  This is how legislators can “milk” citizens for more money.

“Double-milkers” can raise even more money.  If there are interests on both sides of an issue, legislators can extort funds from both.

According to a recent report, Democrats plan to use a drive to increase federal and state minimum wages as a 2014 election strategy. (“Democrats Turn to Minimum Wage as 2014 Strategy”, NYT 12/30/13.)

Generally, a binding minimum wage law will reduce the employment of the lowest-skilled workers. However, two economic fallacies that cloud the issue are prevalent, one among opponents of the minimum wage, and one among proponents.

The first fallacy is that an increase in the minimum wage (MW) will invariably lead to layoffs of the lowest-skill workers. In fact, a moderate increase in the MW could easily lead to no perceptible layoffs at all, and a windfall gain for workers at the expense of employers who have invested in their training. But to the extent employers can foresee the increase in the MW, they would never have hired these workers in the first place.

The second fallacy is that a MW can permanently increase low-skill employment when labor markets are not perfectly competitive. While it is true that a MW could conceivably increase employment of some workers in the short run, this is again at the expense of employers who have invested in capacity in the expectation of the market wage. If they had anticipated the MW, they would have invested on a smaller scale, or perhaps not at all.

In either case, in the long run, a MW unambiguously reduces the employment of low-skilled workers, even when labor markets are imperfectly competitive.

As most Americans were contemplating where to put their new Christmas presents, President Obama on Thursday signed into law the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual federal law that provides the budget for the Department of Defense—and lately has delivered a whole lot of power to the Executive, to boot.

As reported previously, NDAA 2012 was dubbed the “Homeland Battlefield Bill,” because it defined the entire United States a “battleground” in the war on terror, and provided the president, for the first time, the power to capture and indefinitely detain any American citizen he deems a suspected “belligerent”—at his own discretion, with no evidence and no trial necessary.

Thus the end of habeas corpus.

Despite his promises to revoke his total discretionary powers of indefinite detention, President Obama has left them untouched—never know when they may come in handy—and the new and improved NDAA 2014 gives him a neat new added bonus: the ability to use, at will, the Total Information Awareness data being captured and indefinitely stored by NSA and other surveillance agencies.

Section 1071(a) of NDAA 2014, directs the Secretary of Defense to “establish a center to be known as the ‘Conflict Records Research Center,’” authorized to compile a “digital research database including translations and to facilitate research and analysis of records captured from countries, organizations and individuals, now or once hostile to the United States.”