Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

This is how Democrats should always act. Stop worrying about losing the right-leaning middle and do your thing. People who can't decide which side they're on go with the side that seems most sure of themselves. It's stupid, but that's how it is. Own your accomplishments, spin your fuck-ups, and move on to the next thing.

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

What you say evokes Josh's "Bitch Slap Theory of Politics".

I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

I like it when a person I disagree with writes something that (a) makes me think, and (b) contains a great deal of hard truths. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you this take-down of all of us here from Slate by Reihan Salam, executive editor of the National Review.

The spree or TL;DR on this: the upper middle class makes political and policy decisions that are often Not Good. Also, they say they are Not Rich when they make gobs of money because it's so expensive to live in places like New Canaan. (Just re-read "The Ice Storm" - I miss Paigow. Sniff.)

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

Now is the time for a buck a gallon gas tax.

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

I agree with a bunch of his complaints. The restrictions on immigration for foreign doctors is something the AMA pushes heavily that is simply horrendously bad policy but pure upper-middle-class protectionism. The door that opened for physician immigration back after Medicaid/Medicare came in back in the 60s, that subsequently got shut by the AMA's lobbyists, resulted in half my clients coming to the country and was a huge burst of talent and creativity.

But I got complaints of my own about the upper middle class and their narrow pursuit of their self interest and the way they ruin the country. He doesn't go far enough, because of his conservative bent.

My biggest complaint: the upper middle class has decimated unions that are critical to our economic well-being as a country because paying people a fair wage or giving them fair working conditions inconveniences them. The hostility of the fucking Uber-users to protections for working people is a big part of the wage stall that has occurred for most Americans. For the Uber-users, the working class ought to aspire to the salary and benefits structure of a Starbucks barrista.

My second biggest complaint: these people are for the most part lazy and feel incredibly self-entitled. They fill our schools with brats who expect well-paying jobs but aren't hungry to actually do anything, and they fill law firms with the go-along-to-get-along types. Most of them could use a good stint out in the countryside, Maoist cultural revolution style, for a little while (perhaps not quite to the famine state the Chinese took it). Send them all to Cuba and let Castro reeducate them.

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

On your first point: I couldn't agree more. Pay people $20/hour and you will stimulate growth as those people have money to spend at businesses, some of which are local, others not, that will need to hire more workers.... If only people understood people.

As to your second-biggest complaint: we are all whores or thieves, the trick is figuring out which you are,

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

One more thing. Bob Seger had it right. Lincoln? Burgundy? Ugggh. Let me hang with the Jeep/Rioja or Porsche/Bordeaux set any day.

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

Oh, come on. What about all the con-artists, arsonists, drug dealers, pornographers, rapists, murderers, vandals, kidnappers....

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

There are high barriers to entry, the market is fairly inelastic, and you don't even want to know what a bitch the logistics are.

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

You have a bit of a contradiction going here, I think... It's hard to say on one hand that doctors should be exposed to marketplace forces that adversely impact them, but cab drivers and union workers should be protected from things like Uber. I'm with you on liberally allowing immigrant docs to practice here, but I think the same open policy should allow innovations like Uber to savage license-leveraging schemes used by cabbies, barbers, interior designers, lawyers, accountants, brokers, etc.

I love the "go along to get along" comment. On that, brother, we could never be more aligned. But I don't think that applies solely to law firms. I see that everywhere. And it's created a really stagnant status quo in the country. A kid should want to innovate and leave the world with some novel contribution, not play the game so he can get an upper middle class salary, 401K, and cushy management position at the cracker factory.

But, considering B-schools are now teaching more and more classes about how to succeed with benign "personal brands" and maneuver the political system of their company (rather than innovate), and the new measure of corporate excellence is degree of conscientiousness (again, rather than innovation or smart risk taking), you can look forward to more and more of these bland, risk-averse fucks boring the shit out of you every day at the office.

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

Agreed. Except here's the problem. For a period at the outset of this policy's institution, it will inflict substantial pain on the rich and the upper middle class. The rich can probably take it, but would rather not. The upper middle class can't bear a divot in cash flow (keeping up with the Joneses, you know...).

These are not mutually exclusively postures. Most of us are both.

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

I like unions. I am not a fan of trade guilds. They serve different functions, though there are times unions themselves forget it and those are times that they and I often end up on the other side of issues (like immigration). The AMA and ABA are trade guilds.

The cab issue is a bit different, and not related to unions at all. It's related to following the law. Uber is an organized criminal operation that disregards laws that apply to other businesses, like wage payment and minimum wage laws, laws on benefits, etc., based on rather thin legal reasoning. Uber's legal positions on employment law are just like John Yoo's - a thin veil for knowingly criminal behavior, attempting to create cover to protect the perpetrators. Their position on licensing law isn't much better. But they're being protected because they're a fad with the UMC.

Uber's also not new. It's just a piecework labor system. If we can't hire them to do the work at the factory because of the damn minimum wage laws and 40 hour work week, let's just send the work home with them, pay them by the piece, and make enforcing the law almost impossible. Again, we got laws....

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

Are any of the regulations on things like taxis grounded in valid policy concerns or are they all the result of regulatory capture?

If the former, shouldn't these also apply to Uber?

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

If you're in a Lincoln, you're within five years of death, or your agent has terribly squandered the high profile you just acquired from that stint on True Detective.

Re: I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy.
 

This is a bit much. The concern over a new piecework system is valid, but it seems you are holding up traditional cab companies as the good guys who follow employment laws.

Do cab companies pay minimum wage and provide benefits to drivers? I don't think so. The drivers are not employees, but independent contractors, who have to pay to lease their cabs, and who are fucked if they can't get enough fares to cover the lease, gas, etc.

Cab companies complain about Uber because they have rigged up the medallion system, which suppresses the supply in order to drive up prices -- not the price of cabfare, so much, but the price of medallions. It's not a coincidence that Uber first took off in the SF Bay Area -- not (just) because so much b.s.-tech-stuff gets started here, but because SF still has the same number of cab medallions that it had decades ago, and it's often impossible to find a cab.

(p.s. I've never ridden Uber, Lyft, or any of the other services.)