Groundhog Day, and They Don't Even Know It

John Stossel's report on the latest attempt by central planners to "fix" contract work contains the following incredible passage:

The Democratic Socialists said they had a solution. Seattle's city council imposed a $26 delivery driver minimum wage.

What could go wrong?

Two years later, we know the answer: Gig workers make no more money, but prices went up.

Apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats added a $5 fee for consumers "to help cover the costs of these ... regulations."

Now Seattle residents complain about prices. "I ordered a $12 sandwich ... $12 grew to $32!" complains one in my new video. "I just deleted the app."

"[Work] has become slow because of the new law," an app driver complains. DoorDash says it got 1.7 million fewer Seattle orders in 2024.

This is what happens when politicians dictate wages.

...

Former Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson admits that the politicians made a mistake: "We created a problem and it's our responsibility to fix it." [bold added]

The last line is not the good news we might momentarily out of hope imagine it to be: All these fools could come up with to explain the devastation they wrought was that they'd picked the wrong number.

That passage reminds me of the following from Leonard Peikoff's lecture, "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand:"

Ayn Rand started thinking in terms of principles, she told me once, at the age of twelve. To her, it was a normal part of the process of growing up, and she never dropped the method thereafter. Nor, I believe, did she ever entirely comprehend the fact that the approach which was second nature to her was not practiced by other people. Much of the time, she was baffled by or indignant at the people she was doomed to talk to, people like the man we heard about in the early 1950s, who was calling for the nationalization of the steel industry. The man was told by an Objectivist why government seizure of the steel industry was immoral and impractical, and he was impressed by the argument. His comeback was: "Okay, I see that. But what about the coal industry?" (Voice of Reason, p. 341-342)

Today, our politicians seem to be a choice of outright criminals -- or people like that man.

Forget about rightly pointing out that two people have the inalienable right to contract bewteen themselves how much one will pay the other for an agreed-upon service. These people can't even apply relatively simple priciples like supply and demand to questions such as What happens to a market when a price is set arbitrarily?

And these are the politicians who are at least willing to admit a mistake.

We are in trouble.

-- CAV