We Bank our Labor as Property

David Boaz recently wrote a commentary titled Bill de Blasio is America's Marxist Mayor and he quoted Mayor de Blasio as saying:

What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development….

Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.

Despite his Marxist desire to have the government control all property, Bill de Blasio has easily won selection by the Democrat Party to run again on their ticket for Mayor of New York City.

Property can be viewed as a way to store or bank the value of one's own labor. To claim that an individual has no right to the property that results from his labor is really just a way to deny ownership of one's own labor. If we do not own our own labor then we also do not own the time or the effort we devote to our labor. The very essence of living for the individual human being is the management of one's own activity including the most important activities of labor which provide us the means to maintain and secure our own life. Without the control of our own saved labor as property, we become subject to every vagary of life, including those of fickle government.

Deprived of our stored labor in the form of property, every fickle decision by committed socialists such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Mayor Bill de Blasio has the potential to be one of whether each individual will live or die. To give them this power is to forfeit all individual control over our lives, making each and every individual a slave to their whims.

New York Further Damages Economy with a Minimum Wage of $15/hr.

A minimum wage mandate is a serious infringement upon the rights of individuals to earn a living, to enter into contracts with one another, and their freedom of association.  It is a fundamentally unethical use of force in which third parties impose their ignorance and values upon others.  It should be opposed with great vigor as a matter of principle.

Too often, Americans believe they are pragmatists with little need for the principles that actually make it easier and far more efficient for them to identify the values and means by which people secure their lives and happiness.  They actually forgo valid principles thinking they can identify the practical means to achieve their values without them.  They pursue this phantom path to their perdition as often as to their happiness.

New York state just mandated a rise in the minimum wage to $15/hour throughout the state for fast food workers working for companies operating in 30 or more locations.  The full requirement has to be met in 2021, with staged increases before that.  The general minimum wage increased from $8.75/hour on 31 December 2014 to $9.00/hour.  Such state-wide minimum wage laws can cause very different degrees of harm in communities with different income levels and different costs of living.  It is also much harder for a state with a lower median household income than the national average to sustain the economic effects of a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour.

Let us examine how this lack of principled support for individual rights is going to cause further harm to the already sub-par New York state economy.  We will compare the median household incomes of many New York state cities to the national average of $53,046.  We will note the cost of living in those cities compared to the national average, given as 100%.  We will compute an effective median household income for these New York cities by dividing their median household income by their cost of living ratio with the national cost of living average.  We will then give the city effective median household income as a percentage of the national median household income.

City	Cost of Living % Compared to National Average	Median Household Income (National = $53,046)	Effective Median Household Income	% National Effective Median Household Income
Yorktown	109	$99,553	$91,333	172
Hauppauge	160	$102,601	$64,126	121
Niagara Falls	74	$33,324	$45,032	85
Schenectady	90	$38,485	$42,761	81
New York City	122	$51,865	$42,512	80
Buffalo	74	$30,502	$41,219	78
Watertown	97	$38,511	$39,702	75
Albany	102	$40,145	$39,358	74
Rochester	80	$30,708	$38,385	72
Elmira	83	$30,122	$36,292	68
Southampton	254	$90,855	$35,770	67
Jamestown	87	$30,835	$35,443	67
Syracuse	89	$31,459	$35,347	67
Poughkeepsie	112	$39,528	$35,293	67
Utica	89	$31,048	$34,885	66
Binghamton	92	$30,179	$32,803	62
Ithaca	113	$29,230	$25,867	49

Only Yorktown, home of many IBM operations, and Hauppauge on Long Island beat the national effective median household income!  Most of the cities in the state have effective median household incomes only 66 to 81% those of the nation as a whole!  The New York state economy is a very bad mess.  The people of New York are generally much worse off than the average American.  New York state was once a rich state and it still has many natural advantages that should help it to hold its own compared to other states, barring negative effects due to its Big Government state government model installed by decades of Democrat one-party control of the state.

There are two closely related reasons for this.  One is that government policies have a very large impact on the cost of living.  Big Government policies drive up the cost of living, until and unless those policies drive so many businesses away that people abandon their housing or are desperate to sell it to move to a location with jobs.  Housing prices drop precipitously in such cases.  Nine of the above cities have a housing cost of living which is 66% of the national average or lower.  These are desolate cities and include cost of housing values in Buffalo at 32%, Rochester at 35%, Niagara Falls at 34%, Jamestown at 38%,  Elmira at 39%, Syracuse at 45%, Utica at 45%, and Schenectady at 53%.

The other effect of Big Government is on businesses whose labor, regulatory, and tax costs are all driven up considerably.  Those businesses then fare worse in competition with other businesses nationally and internationally.  They expand more slowly than they would otherwise.  They have less money to invest in facilities, production equipment, employee training devoted to the company core purposes, research and development, quality control, and better pay and benefits for their employees generally.  They deliver lower returns to their investors and cause those investors to abandon them.  Highly skilled and hardworking employees move to states that pay them better and where they can find healthier companies with which to build their careers.  There is an inevitable failure of the state economy to keep up with those of states with more limited governments.

The abysmally low effective median household incomes of most of New York state's cities above are a result of and a clear indicator of the very unwise economic policies of the state of New York.  This was once a wealthy state with comparatively higher median incomes.  There is still great wealth in New York, but it is in the hands of a relative few people, thanks to government policies.  The very big government of the state of New York has been mostly controlled by Democrats for a 100 years, and when it was not, it was in the hands of Progressive Elitist Republicans.  Despite the many claims of concern for economic equality, the divergence in income levels in New York state is actually unusually large compared to most other states, especially those with much more limited power governments.

The cost of the higher than average minimum wage payments has to be spread over some combination of higher prices, lower wages for other employees, lower returns to investors, less investment in facilities except those which allow a facility to operate with fewer employees, and fewer low skill employees.  In general, the choices which will be made to meet the minimum wage demand will have the net effect of providing less money to the communities of New York.  Most of the people in these communities are already suffering by the national standard of income.  How are most of those people supposed to be able to pay a few among them much higher wages?  The present $9.00/hour general rate and the future $15/hour rate for fast food workers are well above the national average minimum wage.  The present high minimum wage is one of many factors responsible for the great income inequality and the low incomes of most New Yorkers already.

Minimum wages have less impact on communities in which most people are well-off, so they can afford to pay more for services.  When those higher minimum wages are in industries that compete outside the state, they hurt more than for local service industries.

The New York state minimum wages are going to hurt most New Yorkers.  They will hurt many businesses and eliminate jobs for the initially least productive potential employees.  Young, under-educated people will be the ones most likely not to be offered jobs.  Blacks and Hispanics will by and large suffer still higher unemployment rates than they do now.  Some will become wards of the state.  Some will leave the state to find jobs.  The working population will become older and older.  This will be a further drain on businesses over time.

It is not hard to figure out these effects.  Generally, economists recognize that labor pay increases with demand for labor.  Demand for labor increases when the added production of an employee more than covers all of the many costs associated with putting an employee to work.  Democrat Socialists who most often support minimum wage increases often know this, but they also know that most people would like to see low-paid workers paid more.  Some low-paid workers would like to be paid more.  Employers are in comparatively small numbers.  Vote maximization suggests that one count on the ignorance and the emotions of most voters on the effects of minimum wages.  They are popular.  But, wise leaders would steer away from them and would work hard to educate voters in the great harm they do.  Such leaders could do much to prevent cities in well-positioned states from falling far below the national effective median household income levels.  But, it is especially hard to find such wise leadership in the bowels of the Democrat Socialist Party.

I was surprised to find just how badly depressed the effective household income of most New Yorkers is.  One does not usually think of most New Yorkers and Mississippians as being in the same highly depressed income boat.  The choice of Democrats to rule one's state has dire consequences.

The Public School Scandal

I have stated over and over that our biggest problem in the fight for the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States of America is the fact that the education of our young is controlled by government.  Government at the local, state, and federal levels always has a conflict of interest in education.  American children need an education in which a cornerstone of their knowledge is knowing that legitimate government, as stated in our Declaration of Independence, is that government which governs with the consent of the governed for the purpose of securing their individual rights.  They need to understand that the purpose of the Constitution was to insure that the federal government had very limited powers dedicated to the purpose of securing individual rights and nothing more.  To understand how important this is, students need a knowledge of the history of great numbers of governments which oppressed the People.  They need a realistic knowledge of the Capitalist system with its free markets for goods, services, and ideas and how that system serves every unique individual by allowing them many, many choices and an easy path to forming many voluntary associations with others for specialized purposes of their own.  They need to understand that socialism cannot accommodate individual rights, cannot recognize the individuality and uniqueness of each of us, and cannot allow us to develop and express ourselves as the individuals we are.  Students need to understand that a Capitalist, free market society offers a richness of life no other system can offer.  Yet, all governments inevitably want to grow and want to feel needed in far more ways than the protection of our individual rights.  And frankly, many politicians hunger for power and learn how to use special interest groups to help them attain it.  Hence, government has a fundamental conflict-of-interest when it is put in charge of running our education system.

Yet, in America, as in most countries, government is in charge of the education of our young.  We know that the quality of government-run education in many other fields than history and civics is also very disappointing.  The governments that run the welfare system, the DMVs, job licensing, metro transportation systems, regulate health insurance and electricity rates, and much else equally poorly, do not do much better with education.  In many cases, they also spend far more money on education than they tell us they spend on it as I reported in this post on Washington, D.C. public schools.  According to a study released on 10 March 2010 by Adam Schaeffer with the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom entitled They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools, this problem of under-reporting the real cost of public school educational expenses is very widespread.  He examines the reported spending and the real spending per pupil for six metropolitan regions, including the five largest for K-12 public schools.  He also compares the cost of the K-12 public schools to an estimate of the cost for private schools in that metropolitan area.  The results are very enlightening and offer a sound reason for hope that we can convince the People that government-run education is a very bad deal indeed.

The Cato Institute report compiled public school K-12 costs for the central city school district, for the highest income adjacent school district and for the lowest income adjacent school district.  I have complied a table to condense the most important of the results found by Adam Schaeffer in the following table:

The public school districts under-reported the true cost of public education per pupil anywhere from 3% to 151%.  Only the low-income North Chicago school district did a faithful job of reporting their real expenditures, though the low-income district in the Phoenix area of Deer Valley at 13% and the low-income district in the Washington, D.C. area of Prince George's County at 17% were much more accurate than most in their reporting.  Los Angeles city school district was the worst: they spent more than 2.5 times as much as they claimed to spend per pupil!  The other districts spent between 22 and 85% more than they reported spending.  It turns out that many voters when told about the difference in real spending from what they thought was being spent per student were very upset.  They indicated that they were not willing be taxed so much as they were for the purpose of spending so much.

Equally interesting as the great deception of the People about the amount spent on public education, is the fact that the public education is clearly no bargain compared to private education.  The public school districts spent between 21% and 201% more than the local private schools!  In 8 out of the 18 public school districts examined, the public schools spent more than 100% more than (twice as much) did the local private schools per pupil.  Only the Houston school districts and the low-income school districts of Phoenix, Los  Angeles, and Washington, D.C., were less than 50% more expensive than the local private schools and all but one of them was one-third or more higher in costs.

Now, I am pretty sure that these private schools are generally offering as good or better educations than the public schools.  I am very sure that if they spent as much as the public schools do per pupil, most private schools would offer a substantially better education.  It would seem very clear that the taxpayers in many of these examined school systems could be convinced that a voucher system that allowed them to send their children to a private school instead of the public school money-eater would be preferable both for providing their children a better education and to save the local tax district a huge amount of money, as they shut down more and more of their schools.  Indeed, even the taxpayers with no children to educate would clearly be better off.

Some will argue that many of the private schools are associated with religious groups.  Indeed, in a country in which the taxpayer has to pay for these very expensive public schools and then has to shell out a substantial amount of money for a private school, there is likely to be another motivation of the effort and commitment, such as a strong belief of some kind.  But, if public policy allows a healthy voucher system, the market for private schools will expand greatly.  Many secular schools will be established, as will be schools with strong arts programs or strong science programs.  The competition to provide good educations at reasonable prices will produce many more good schools that people can afford more readily than the bloated socialist holding cells we call schools today.

So, when the topic of public education comes up in your school district, do not feel bashful about informing your conversant that public schools are ridiculously expensive and provide a poor education compared to what a private school can and will provide.  Let's get the People to demand a shift from government-run schools to private schools, where the parents will once again have a say in the education of their children and the taxpayers will have some relief.  The public schools are just one more case of the gullible being taken for a ride by government.

Central Park Temperature Record Shenanigans

When a scientific fraud unravels, it can do so with remarkable rapidity.  This is especially true when the fraud was massive and aimed at a huge power grab over the lives of others.

A comparison of raw temperature data of the NOAA National Climate Data Center (NCDC) with its adjusted data for Central Park in New York City has now been performed for the two extreme months of July and January.  The NCDC keeps two major adjusted compilations of station by station temperature data.  One is the HCSN Version 1 set and the other is the other is the GHCN Version 2 data set.  The latter is used in the UN IPCC reports.

Let's first compare the raw temperature measurements for July with the HCSN Version 1 set. The data is shown below:

Note that the adjusted data has had its temperatures dropped everywhere, but in very different amounts over time.  The upper raw temperature data curve has a polynomial fit with a maximum temperature in about 1971 or 1972, with a very small decline after that time.  The adjusted temperature history of the HCN data set has a decided rise after about 1980.  Let's look at the adjustment made here more carefully.  The HCSN adjustment is plotted below:

For some reason an increasing temperature was subtracted from the raw temperature data beginning after 1939 and this increased until it was a bit more than 6.5 F.  Then in 2000, the temperature subtracted was decreased rapidly through 2007.  The strange thing is that rapid changes in the urban heat island effect occur as a city expands and envelops rural areas.  But Central Park has been surrounded by a very high population density throughout the period from 1939 to the present, so the heat island effect should not be changing so much.  Furthermore, the rapid decrease in the temperature subtracted since the year 2000 should be due to a rapid depopulation of the city.  In fact, NYC has been growing in population since 1990, so if anything, the temperature subtracted should have been slightly more, not much less!  This is Voodoo Science!

As mentioned, there is also a temperature record (GHCN) provided to the UN IPCC and generally kept for world-wide temperature change comparisons.  Remember, in such comparisons, we are interested in tracking very small changes of a few tenths of a degree, yet we have seen already that adjustments of more than 6 F are being applied to the raw data.  This is always dicey science when small changes are to be detected on data being adjusted with large comparative adjustments.  The raw data, the HCN adjusted data, and the GHCN adjusted data are all compared in the plot below.

Now note that the raw data is the middle plot in blue.  The two NOAA NCDC adjusted July average temperature data sets are the most different.  The hottest of the three sets of data is the global comparison data which went into the UN IPCC assessment data.  For reasons unfathomable to rational man, the net effect of having a weather station in the middle of NYC, one of the world's larger cities, is an artificial cooling effect and it has to be adjusted with a general increase to the raw temperature data.  Yes, the well-know urban heat island effect, is sometimes an urban cooling effect and sometimes and urban heating effect, by implication given the adjustments provided by our NOAA NCDC!  The temperature difference between the two NOAA NCDC temperature data sets is as large as 11 F.

Basically, it looks as though the UN IPCC wanted data indicating high and rising temperatures.  The upper green trace gave them high temperatures and the data mostly parallels the raw data, so essentially no urban heat island differential adjustment seems to have been made over time compared to the raw data.  Of course, the raw data of 2007 surely already has a rise in it due to the increased population and bigger buildings in NYC since 1909, so leaving that effect in gave the global warming alarmists the temperature increase they needed, although little of the increase occurred in the late 20th Century in the Central Park data.  Such increases could readily be found in the data from many other U.S. weather stations, however.  What was important here was maintaining the fiction that the urban heat island effect is unimportant and no adjustment for it is needed over time.  That way, all the rural stations which have become suburban stations need not be adjusted downward for the urban heat island effect.

This is the hand made visible of massive fraud, once again.