David McElroy

If California Democrats have their way, hiring babysitters and nannies is soon going to get pretty complicated. It’s going to take more than a spoonful of sugar for this medicine to go down.

California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has proposed legislation that would require any adult hired as a sitter to be paid at least minimum wage, but the bill would also require parents to “provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers’ compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.”

The bill has already passed the lower house of the California Legislature and is on its way through the Senate now. The only good news so far is that the Senate has stripped out the part about paid vacation days.

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A commission investigating U.S. wartime spending over the last decade estimates that the federal government has wasted $60 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan due to “lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and payoffs to warlords and insurgents.” Is there a single person who’s surprised at this?

The Associated Press got an advance copy of the report Tuesday from the Commission on Wartime Contracting, but it will be public Wednesday. As disgusting as it is, I just find myself wondering why commissions bother to investigate such things. This happens with pretty much every government-run project of any sort, doesn’t it? Except for some super-scrupulous manager in a fairly small local state office, it’s almost impossible to stop it from happening.

Why can’t we stop it? Simple. There’s no incentive to stop it. When bureaucrats are in the middle of spending money — especially for what counts as a “crisis” — there are no brakes on the system. They simply spend the money and do the accounting later. It’s always this way. It can’t be any other way, because they have no incentive to stop.

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It’s sometimes hard to say whether economic ignorance is more severe among the poor and uneducated or the rich and overeducated.

We recently had Warren Buffet issue a call to raise taxes on wealthy people such as himself in this country. (As I pointed out then, Buffet is welcome to donate his own money, but for some reason, that’s not the route he’s taking.) Now some of the elite of Europe’s rich are getting in on the act, too, as various wealthy people in a number of countries are calling for their taxes to be raised.

A German group is proposing that wealthy people pay a special 5 percent wealth tax for two years. Does anyone sane think it would stop at two years?

Why is it that these people are being treated as sacrificial when they’re actually demanding that other people have their money confiscated? If these people believe they owe their money to their fellow citizens, they’re perfectly capable of voluntarily turning over every bit of their money. Instead, they’re demanding that the state force other people to turn over their money.

Anyone who believes that taxing the rich — however you define that group — will end the coercive state’s economic problems is delusional. What’s more, it’s wrong.

I’m not among the rich. I’d like to be, but I’m not. However, they don’t owe me anything. They have no responsibility to subsidize the lives of the rest of us. Taxation is a moral evil. Progressive taxation — which simply means that you are penalized at an even higher rate if you’re successful — is both evil and stupid.