Reports Bob Tamasy, columnist for the Chattanoogan.com:

 “We are short staffed. Please be patient with the staff that did show up. No one wants to work anymore.”

Supply and demand, baby.  Offer people money not to work, and they’ll take it.  In the early days of the pandemic, it maybe made sense.  We wanted people to stay home.  That ended, oh, last June or July.  No wonder that in April 266,000 jobs were created, only 734,000 or so short of expectations.  That’s a miss so epic, it’s almost comical.  Only the willfully blind could fail to see and understand.  Unfortunately, Joe Biden is President.

What’s true in Chattanooga seems to be true in the TriCities as well.  Practically every store has a “We’re Hiring!” sign in the window.  Governor Lee is to be commended for following the good example of Montana and South Carolina to stop offering supplemental unemployment benefits.  Time to get back to work, whether lazy people, the politicians who enable them, and the mainstream press which justifies it, like it or not.

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We were in Greenville, South Carolina for Mother’s Day and, on a whim, went to an outdoor art fair downtown. (If you haven’t been in downtown Greenville in a while, you’d hardly recognize it.  Not that long ago it was tired, dingy and ugly.  It’s been beautifully transformed in the last 10 years.  Wonderful!)  We had to wait in line because attendance was limited, our time “inside” was limited so others could get in, and all the staff and artists were wearing masks; well, sort of, when they had to.  I just had to laugh and shake my head.  When this was planned months ago, I guess it all made sense.  Except the social distancing and mask wearing parts, since it’s nearly impossible to catch Covid when you’re outside in the sun.  It’s of a piece with what a doctor friend recently called “mask theater”.  Not doing anything worthwhile, just making self-righteous, virtue-signaling control freaks feel all tingly, and a lot of timid, ill-informed Caspar Milquetoasts feel safer when, in fact, they’re not.

But the art was nice.

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Say the editors of National Review in A Welcome Backlash against Critical Race Theory: “In practice, [Critical Race Theory] leads to rank racialism.”  That’s being overly polite.  Critical Race Theory is straight-up, rank racism.  I thought we were trying to leave that behind us.  Silly me.

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It’s hard to know where to start with this dreadful editorial in the Johnson City Press:

https://www.johnsoncitypress.com/opinion/tennessee-quickly-forgot-essential-workers/article_61478492-b336-11eb-b325-678df262a65d.html

Let’s start with “confusing”.  Are we talking about essential workers or the unemployed?    Essential workers who kept on working during the pandemic have earned well-deserved praise from everyone, and I don’t think that people who lost their jobs because of the pandemic are begrudged the extra help they’ve received; but what do they have to do with one another?   In case the editorial writer at the Press hasn’t caught on yet, the pandemic is (almost) over and it’s time to get back to work.  As for what lazy people think about it – those in no hurry to go back to work because the government is literally paying them not to work – well, I couldn’t care less.  But the essential workers, the ones who kept on going in spite of the risks and temptations to just go on the dole – no need to worry about them.  They obviously want to work, and employers will do just about anything to keep people like that.  They are the last ones to lose their jobs, and their bosses will pay whatever it takes to keep them from going elsewhere.

From there, let’s continue with “dumb”.  Unemployment benefits are supposed to help keep body and soul together while people find a new job, not be a substitute for gainful employment.  A government that does any more is hurting everyone and helping no one.  A wage is the price of labor; only when it comes to labor does anyone think that price fixing – i.e. the minimum wage – is a good idea.  The federal minimum wage is a job-killer if it’s set too high or a useless fiction if it’s set below the market wage, and a state-set minimum is just more of the same.  None of this is exactly news or rocket science, just basic economics.

And let’s end with “silly” and “misleading”.  This editorial is little more than a list of discredited Democratic Party talking points based on a ridiculous juxtaposition of the hard working and the timorous lazy, a flawed misunderstanding of economics, and misplaced compassion that does more harm than good.  A shame our editorial writer doesn’t understand this.  Or does he?

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You may have heard that the Supreme Court is going to take up a Mississippi anti-abortion law this term.  It appears to be a direct challenge to Roe v Wade, which most legal analysts, regardless of their opinion on the subject, believe was poorly decided.  According to a paper published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a unit of the National Institutes for Health (typical offering: “Assemble and annotate your prokaryotic genomes with RAPT”), “Black women have been experiencing induced abortions at a rate nearly 4 times that of White women for at least 3 decades….it is the most demographically consequential occurrence for the minority population….In the current unfolding environment, there may be no better metric for the value of Black lives.”  White supremacists for abortion rights!

• Kenneth D. Gough © 2021