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If prices are instrumental in providing needed information to market participants, then inflation can be seen as introducing static into the system, creating more uncertainty and leading to bad choices.
The word “democracy” is almost sacrosanct in modern society, yet what advocates call “our democracy” is not what it claims to be. Real democracy can be found in the workings of the free market, not the political halls.
But corporate greed or price gouging has never been a plausible theory of price changes, let alone inflation. Corporations with substantive market power don’t need pretext. They can always extract high prices by artificially limiting supply. And firms without market power that try to pocket a windfall invite undercutting by rivals; that’s especially true of hypercompetitive retail gas stations. When prices rise simultaneously across an entire industry—nay, across the entire world—the far simpler explanation is either a demand shock or a common cost shock—precisely the sort a war-driven supply shock produces. Consumers have to be willing and able to pay the higher prices, after all.
A lot of politicians around the world seem to get upset if prices for retail gas spike on inventory that was acquired at lower cost. They regard that as unfair “gouging.” Few of them, I suspect, insist on selling their homes for the price they paid for them. But fundamentally, this misunderstands the role of market prices, which reflect the relevant scarcity of the products in each new context. The opportunity cost for firms of selling oil below what the market will bear today is the price that could be obtained elsewhere in the world. Firms also need to replace inventory at the new market price. So, yes, they might make a short-term accounting profit on some inventory, but this is quite transitory.
Timothy Taylor shares insights from Richard Baldwin’s new monograph, World War Trade. Two slices:
We have been living through the silly season of Trump’s tariff policy for some months now. Baldwin lays out the details: here’s my own summary. The Trump administration has made innumerable announcements about tariff policy, and you will be stunned to learn that every single one of them is a greater triumph than the one before, natch. High announced tariffs? A triumph. Announcing an agreement that would reduce those tariffs? Another triumph. Creating exceptions and loopholes in the lower tariffs to ease the pain on US consumers and on US firms importing inputs to production? Yet another triumph. Announcing a new round of high tariffs? One more triumph. A new tariff policy has a completely different reason than the previous tariff policy? Yet another triumph of statesmanship. Indeed, every time a previous tariff policy is changed, or even abolished, it simply demonstrates that all previous tariff policies were triumphs. Then the US Supreme Court ruled that most of the tariffs imposed since April 2, 2025, were all unconstitutional to begin with. And President Trump reacted by imposing yet another round of tariffs with another pretextual legal rationale.
As US manufacturing firms struggle to deal with higher prices and cutoffs and heightened uncertainty of their global supply chains for inputs, and US consumers face higher prices as a result of tariffs, what’s the rest of the world doing? Baldwin argues persuasively that other nations of the world are pursuing regional free-trade agreements that pointedly leave out the United States–so that US firms have no voice in the negotiations. Baldwin calls it the “domino theory of regionalism,” which is the idea that regional free trade agreements benefit those who are inside, and thus disadvantage those who are outside. Every time an outsider decides to join up, it’s one more domino falling into place.
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Baldwin writes of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announced on April 2, 2025: “Donald Trump’s Rose Garden tariffs were historic in the most disruptive sense of the word. By raising tariffs on almost everything from almost every nation, he broke most of the trade promises America had ever made.” That epic level of promise-breaking will echo into the future of US diplomacy on all subjects.
Alan Beattie compares Tariff Man to Nixon. Two slices:
Donald Trump came into office as the self-styled “Tariff Man” superhero who would tear apart global trade and refashion it under the muscular doctrine of America First. He seems likely instead to be remembered as the supervillain “Epic Fury”, who set the Middle East ablaze and endangered worldwide prosperity and the US’s standing with it.
A year on from his supposed “liberation day”, which imposed sweeping tariffs across the board, Trump has certainly delivered a rupture from the multilateral system which came before. But rather than regressing to the protectionism of the 1930s — not least because other countries have declined to join in — he seems to have stumbled back only to the early years of President Richard Nixon.
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Two Republican presidents who started with a somewhat similar attitude to trade both hit the real-world limits of fighting a trade war. Yet it’s revealing how toxic the US attitude to trade has become that the 1970s original shifted towards liberalisation bounded by agreements, while the 2020s redux continues to regard open and rules-based trade with unremitting hostility. It’s not often that historians look back to Nixon’s presidency with nostalgia, but his legacy seems like a golden era of multilateral openness compared with the destructive economic nationalism of Trump.
James Pethokoukis tweets this line from this report in The Economist:
‘Here is an uncomfortable truth for hand-wringing policymakers: Europe’s dependency on America is in no small part Europe’s own fault. Decades of over-regulating the old continent’s economy left businesses there unable to compete with American firms’
America, Eberstadt says, has had “the most robust demographic growth of any developed society.” The Social Security Administration, predicting what it must desperately desire, projects another 100 million Americans by 2100. But intractable pathologies — including government’s fiscal incontinence and “pay-as-you-go entitlements” — spell catastrophe for a nation with an upside-down “population pyramid,” where each generation is smaller than the previous one.
“Who is Hasan Piker?” – Jim Geraghty has the unattractive answer.
Also writing about Comrade Piker and his ethically challenged ilk is Reason‘s Robby Soave. A slice:
Stealing is bad, and you shouldn’t do it. It’s really as simple as that. Children understand this, even from a young age, and it’s taught to them by their parents, grandparents, teachers, and other mentors. Some people, of course, find themselves in desperate circumstances, and are forced to steal to survive. We may empathize with them, and we may even decide that their situation mitigates the blameworthiness of the offense. That doesn’t change the wrongness of stealing, though. If you catch your kids snatching a candy bar from the grocery store checkout line, you invariably punish them. You don’t commend them for striking a blow against capitalist oppression.
Enter leftists Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino, who have been roundly and deservedly mocked on social media after participating in a podcast interview for The New York Times titled “The Rich Don’t Play By the Rules. So Why Should I?” Already, we are on shaky ground here, since the headline—a direct quote from host Nadja Spiegelman—positions Piker, Tolentino, and Spiegelman as a trio of people that should be contrasted with the rich. This is ridiculous: All three are members of the wealthy, successful, cultural elite. Spiegelman is a culture editor for the Times, an author, a cartoonist, and the daughter of legendary cartoonist Art Spiegelman (creator of Maus, a well-known graphic novel about the Holocaust). Tolentino is a relatively famous feminist writer of not-exactly modest means. Piker is a wildly successful far-left Twitch streamer and nephew of The Young Turks‘ Cenk Uygur, who gave him his start. Suffice it to say, these are not people who need to steal to survive.
And yet, their conversation includes a full-throated defense of shoplifting.
Peter Suderman watched Michael so we don’t have to.
The post Some Links appeared first on Cafe Hayek.
Zohran Mamdani rode to victory as New York City's mayor in part due to his audacious campaign promises around freezing the rent and offering free bus service to Big Apple residents. But perhaps no campaign promise of Mamdani's was as bold as his "$30 by '30" plan, which called for increasing the city's minimum wage to $30 by 2030.
Now that Mamdani is in office, New York City Council members have introduced a bill to turn $30 by '30 from a catchy campaign slogan into an economic reality.
But while the top-line number of $30 has received most of the attention, the fine print in the legislation may be even more alarming: It would eliminate what's known as the tipped-wage credit for restaurants in NYC, meaning that mom-and-pop restaurants—some of the city's smallest businesses—would find themselves on the hook for paying workers $30 an hour. Restauranteurs around the city are sounding the alarm, warning that the bill could pose a dire threat to NYC's famed dining scene.
Restaurants operate under a unique wage structure in most locales across America. Rather than being subject to the traditional minimum wage, tipped employees at these establishments receive part of their compensation in the form of gratuities. A legal structure called the tipped-wage credit allows such restaurant workers to be paid below the minimum wage pre-tips; if a server's tips still leave them below the full minimum wage, then restaurant owners are responsible for making up the difference.
The tip credit system has been in place for 60 years, allowing restaurant workers to make upwards of $30 or $40 an hour—or more—once tips are factored in, while also giving owners a way to control labor costs in an industry notorious for its tight margins.
Progressive cities like Washington, D.C. and Chicago have experimented with eliminating the tip credit system in recent years, and the results have been nothing short of disastrous. After D.C. scrapped its tip credit and required servers to be paid a traditional minimum wage, restaurant worker earnings reportedly fell in the District as restaurants cut jobs and reduced hours for staff.
Restaurants also responded by raising dining prices in the form of new "service fees," and D.C.'s progressive city council was ultimately forced to partially reverse the tip credit's phaseout. The experience in Chicago was similar.
But whereas D.C. and Chicago sought to scrap the tip credit system and replace it with a minimum wage around $16 to $17 per hour, NYC's plan would nearly double this wage rate to $30. A group of about 40 independent restaurants in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood—known for its world-leading dining scene—are now laying out in detail what this increased minimum would mean for diners who frequent their restaurants.
By 2031, they say, a $21 hamburger would become $33; a $14 glass of wine would increase to $22; and a $24 salmon salad would spike to $37. Worse yet, these prices don't even factor in taxes, and they are only based on a $19.33 per hour minimum wage. (The proposed legislation would gradually raise servers' hourly wage over time, until it eventually reaches $30 per hour after 2031).
The wage hike could force restaurants to cut back on employment, too. "Places will have to cut their staff in half and use QR codes on the table," said Sean Hayden, an owner of numerous Hell's Kitchen restaurants, in an interview with W42ST. "It'll be like airport service."
These restaurant owners are hardly profit-grabbing monopolists. One establishment reported that its tipped staff members currently earn over $41 an hour on average when combining an $11.35 hourly wage and tips.
Their warnings are not merely apocalyptic doomcasting, either. Los Angeles voted in May of last year to raise the minimum wage for hotel workers to $30 an hour by 2028. The American Hotel and Lodging Association has since reported that 88 percent of hotels have experienced layoffs or reduced hours and just under 60 percent have reduced overtime availability as well as worker benefits and amenities. While various factors play into these reductions, over 90 percent of hotel owners cite the rising labor costs as a key component.
An Oxford Economics analysis forecasted that L.A.'s hotel wage mandate would lead to a reduction of over 14,000 jobs in the city. L.A.'s gradual minimum wage hikes for hotels over the years—starting in 2015—have already led to notable reductions in employment. The City of Angels can ill afford such a hit to its hospitality industry ahead of hosting the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics.
For NYC's part, Mamdani has yet to officially endorse the new legislation, although his campaign track record strongly points toward him ultimately backing it. If he does, $33 hamburgers might become the norm sooner than later.
The post A $33 Burger? As New York City Eyes $30 Minimum Wage, Restaurants Brace for Impact appeared first on Reason.com.
SHUT IT DOWN:
The NGO funding machine is getting harder to ignore.
USAID funneled $27 million through the Tides Center, with some of it going directly into the Southern Poverty Law Center.
For years, the liberal left inside the federal government hijacked nonprofits as pass-through vehicles;… https://t.co/MZjDph6sGk pic.twitter.com/4Lc0U3U7Ob
— Rick de la Torre (@vrk_rick) April 24, 2026
U.S. — The nation was left in complete disbelief today upon learning that the so-called Patriot Front might have actually been fake.
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