Some things are easy to avoid.
Don’t want to be hit by a train? Don’t play on train tracks. Don’t want your kid to get measles? Get them vaccinated. Can’t afford to pay your employees more? Don’t advocate for raising the minimum wage. Done and done.
But many granola-crunching, tofu-eating progressives think they can kale their way to a super immune system for their kids, so they’re skipping the vaccinations for measles and everything else. And other progressives are closing their businesses because the laws for which they advocated have sent them to the poorhouse.
To paraphrase President Barack Obama’s friend and mentor, progressives’ chickens are coming home to roost.
The measles outbreak is a serious concern for people with suppressed immune systems and sane people everywhere. But it’s not a concern for idiots like Crystal McDonald. McDonald was featured in a New York Times story about the bizarre cult of wealthy, white progressives who think they can Prius and kale their kids into a super immune system and vaccines are for rednecks. How else to explain that Mississippi and West Virginia are first and second when it comes to immunized kindergarteners while kids are getting sick in droves in enlightened California?
McDonald’s 16-year-old daughter was sent home from school in Palm Desert, Calif., for two weeks because her mother refuses to let her go where China was in the 15th century and get immunized. When begged by her daughter, who didn’t want to fall behind in her advanced placement classes (and may well have a better understanding of science than her Luddite mother), to get the shots, “Mommie Dumbest” said, “No, absolutely not. I’d rather you miss an entire semester than you get the shot.”
In lieu of rational thought, McDonald, according to the Times, cites that her daughter “ate well and had never been to the doctor, and she insisted that her daughter was healthier than many classmates.”
Not sure how never having gone to a doctor is a good thing for the parent of a 16-year-old to brag about, but the “she’s healthier than other kids” argument is the dumbest part of McDonald’s statement. Maybe she’s never been sick, which is a dubious claim. But you know what else she’s never been? Exposed to a serious and easily communicable, yet preventable, disease for which there are readily available immunizations.
Ms. McDonald has successfully, at least so far, played Russian Roulette with her kids’ health and come up with the empty chamber. But everyone’s luck runs out sooner or later.
I honestly don’t care what McDonald does to her daughter (once fully mature enough to realize how cavalierly her mother treated her health I suspect she won’t be a fan of mom), it’s the people around her I care about. There are plenty of people with suppressed immune systems who don’t have the ability to look at McDonald and realize she’s raising a petri dish for things that could kill them.
I’m not for forced immunizations, but I am for the mutants who think they can “healthy live” away a virus being shamed for their ignorance. Either that or they be forced to take the “COEXIST” sticker off their Smart Car and slap it on their forehead so those who are at risk can see them coming.
Further north in “enlightened” California, sits Borderlands Books, a hotbed of sci-fi literature, or as the rest of us call it “chick magnets.”
The San Francisco nerd-locker is, like most other things in the Bay Area, very progressive. (Bet you thought I was going to say “unshowered,” which is probably also accurate.) So progressive, in fact, that when the city voted last year to raise its minimum wage to $15 per hour, the staffers threw their support (and presumably their Spock ear) behind the ballot measure. It passed.
After the joy of imposing a “living wage” on businesses subsided, the owners of Borderlands broke out their calculator and learned entry-level economics the hard way. The policy they wholeheartedly supported was going to be their doom.
They took to the store’s website, to announce the sad news.
In November, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly passed a measure that will increase the minimum wage within the city to $15 per hour by 2018. Although all of us at Borderlands support the concept of a living wage in principal and we believe that it’s possible that the new law will be good for San Francisco — Borderlands Books as it exists is not a financially viable business if subject to that minimum wage. Consequently we will be closing our doors no later than March 31st. The cafe will continue to operate until at least the end of this year.
“We won! You’re fired!”
That simple fact would still be worth mocking, but the owners of Borderlands didn’t stop there. They went on to explain in more detail why they had to go out of business, and in the course of that they reveal just how ignorant of simple economic principles they and their progressive brothers and sisters are.
Many businesses can make adjustments to allow for increased wages. The cafe side of Borderlands, for example, should have no difficulty at all. Viability is simply a matter of increasing prices. And, since all the other cafes in the city will be under the same pressure, all the prices will float upwards. But books are a special case because the price is set by the publisher and printed on the book. Furthermore, for years part of the challenge for brick-and-mortar bookstores is that companies like Amazon.com have made it difficult to get people to pay retail prices. So it is inconceivable to adjust our prices upwards to cover increased wages.
This isn’t “Econ-101,” it’s “Econ-098.” This is making-change-level simple. Yet these geniuses couldn’t connect those dots in their heads. If government raises the cost of doing business, prices increase. If you can’t do that, either because you can’t set your prices or consumers won’t pay more for your products because they can get them somewhere else cheaper, you’re done.
Lost on the intelligentsia of nerd haven is that if you raise the cost of things by forcing employers to pay employees more, the gains you were seeking will be lost (as well as jobs). So although their income increased, their buying power remains the same (and for soon-to-be former employees of Borderlands, it will decrease dramatically). They’ve just been moved from one steerage cabin on the Titanic to another.
Some things are impossible to foresee; others as easy as a sunrise. That choices and actions have consequences seems to fall firmly in the former category for many progressives.
But, as long and slow of a process as it is, it seems to be “progressing” for at least some of them. With any luck these reality wake-up calls won’t just be reserved for Whole Foods hippie moms and those voted most likely to make it with a Tribble; hopefully they’ll also hit 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…or at least some fellow travelers in the media.
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