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The most prevalent theme in President Barack Obama's Dec. 6 Osawatomie, Kan., speech was the need for greater "fairness." In fact, though the president never defined the term fair(ness), he used it 15 times.
Explaining his new hero, Teddy Roosevelt, Obama said: "But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest."
What's fair competition is somewhat subjective, but let me suggest a few examples of what's clearly unfair.
Say a person wants to become a taxi owner. He has a driver's license, a car and accident liability insurance. Is it fair that in New York City, he has to first purchase a taxi license (medallion) that as of October sold for $1 million? Taxi licenses in Chicago go for $56,000. In Boston, they are $285,000, and in Philadelphia, they run $75,000. Is that fair competition?
In some cities, to own a taxi one must obtain a certificate of "public convenience and necessity." At a Public Utility Commission hearing, incumbent taxi owners show up with their attorneys to protest that another taxi company is not needed, and the application is denied. I'd like to have Obama — or anyone else — tell us whether that's fair competition.
The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 is a law with racist origins and broad congressional support. During the 1931 legislative debate over the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates super-minimum (mostly union) wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects, racist intents were obvious.
Rep. John Cochran, D-Mo., supported the bill, saying he had "received numerous complaints ... about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South."
Rep. Clayton Allgood, D-Ala., complained: "Reference has been made to a contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. ... That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country."
Rep. William Upshaw, D-Ga., spoke of the "superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor." American Federation of Labor President William Green said, "Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates."
The Davis-Bacon Act remains law. Modern rhetoric in support of it has changed, but its effects haven't. It continues to discriminate against nonunion construction labor. Most black construction workers are in the nonunion sector.
By now, it's obvious that adopting the euro was a colossal blunder. It may rank as Europe's worst policy mistake since World War II. The virtues of the common currency — it reduced transaction costs and the uncertainty of fluctuating exchange rates among national monies — were ...
Last week's European Summit shows how difficult it is for the European Union to confront its fundamental economic problems. Since 2007, many European Union countries have suffered loss of their rates of growth and high unemployment. Yet the European Summit offers no plan for growth. More trouble ...
Pushing his agenda for higher taxes on "the rich," President Obama kicked off his Dec. 6 speech in Kansas by saying his Kansas grandparents "shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression." In fact, the 1929 stock market crash turned into the long-running Great Depression ...
On Oct. 12, 1948, the campaign train of Tom Dewey, Republican nominee against President Harry Truman, pulled into Beaucoup, Ill., where, from the rear platform, he would speak to about 1,000 people. Before he began, the engineer mistakenly caused the train to lurch a few feet backward, frightening ...
Obama "overachieved" with two groups in 2008; he will need a 2012 repetition. In the last election, Democrats benefited greatly from African-Americans and young Americans voting in excess of their population percentage and their 2004 participation percentage and Democrat support percentage. In ...
Posted By: Imprimis(695) on 12/14/2011 | 7:53 PM ET
Why not emulate a successful program such as the GI Bill? Better yet why not remove the noncompos mentis who purport to represent our capitalist country.
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