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Atlas Shrugged’s Strike by Active Minds Composes The Requiem for Seattle’s Mindless Grungelords

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Not so long ago, someone told us “You. Can’t. Say. Anything.” This is America in 2020. Those who speak outside the narrative established by a hard-left mob that has marched through our institutions are blacklisted. If we fail to mount a forceful resistance, there’s a grim future awaiting us.¹

The story mentioned no names. “Inequalities still exist among us,” the newspapers were saying, “and cheat us of the benefits of our enlightened age. We fear an outbreak of violence,” the newspapers kept repeating.²

We’ve seen this coming. The casualty list has been growing for years. The purge is now white hot. What was a non-controversial statement last week is grounds for a death sentence tomorrow. It seems every day we see someone caving in with a groveling apology, declaring they suddenly have a lot to learn, swearing they’re looking forward to the moment they can meet with their hostage-takers and work toward a resolution that will appease them.¹

Their faces had a look of fear and cunning, the look of blackmail through virtue which he had learned to understand, as if they hoped to get away with it by means of nothing but his pity. They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared consider the third alternative.²

No manifesto exists to guide the shock troops through their revolutionary occupation of our society. But recently, on the day Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy was forced to ask forgiveness for the sin of wearing a One America News t-shirt, praising the network, and criticizing the mainstream media, a maniacal Twitter storm from a leftist blogger laid out the belief system that under-girds the movement.¹

What he saw in her eyes was terror – not the helpless terror of struggling and failing to understand, but the terror of being pushed toward the edge where to avoid understanding would no longer be possible.²

Got that? Those who hold different views are deranged. They’re criminals. Dangerous. They shouldn’t be allowed to hold jobs where they might have some influence over others. They need to be forced into hard labor and sent to re-education camps, where they will be brainwashed to ensure they will engage only in Orwellian goodthink.¹

You keep pressing us for answers when we haven’t any answers to give. You keep beating us with logic – what’s logic at a time like this? What’s logic when people are suffering?²

The purge should have never been allowed to come this far. But the elitists who control universities, school boards, corporations, the media, sports leagues, have surrendered rather than stand on principle, as have a good number of high-profile individuals.¹

The boy’s teachers had delivered him to the thugs gun. As the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.²

Is there not one provost or school president or dean in higher education, one public school superintendent, one corporate CEO, one publisher or editor who will resist? Who will say that expressing thoughts that challenge the narrative is not grounds for banishment and dismissal? Who will say that no apology is needed for speaking freely?¹

Yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.² 

It’s an increasingly common form of bullying, one that goes to the very heart of what defines us as a free nation. A society in which only pre-approved speech can be uttered is not healthy. It’s a tyranny, rancid and terror-filled. The only choice is to resist.¹

Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed indignant, bewildered protest, and had perished in his first attempt to soar on mangled wings.²

How did anti-conceptual slogans become proof of intellect? Why does joining a mob pass for courageous self-expression? When did the threat of violence and mass looting of innocent lives become justice?³

He saw a lout scurrying across a patch of lamplight, swinging a lethal pipe at a wall of glass panes, battering them down with animal relish, dancing like a gorilla to the sound of crashing glass.²

The cultural civil war that has been simmering underneath the surface is now boiling. Consider that as much as the protests can largely be described as peaceful, they have now led to more than a dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and theft.ˆ

He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world.²

The ‘abolish the police’ movement is the final piece needed to replicate the mentality of the New Left in the late 1960s–positions so crazy that only people completely out of touch with reality can advocate them with a straight face.ˆ

She watched them through the reports about bullet riddled cars, dismantled tracks, attacked trains, besieged stations, the futile doomed outbreaks, prompted by nothing but despair, ending in nothing but destruction.² 

The images of woke white protesters brought to their knees across the country, apologizing to the mob for sins they did not commit, is jarring and disturbing. At the heights of elite power – in the corporate board rooms that have decided to blast us with emails touting their payment of indulgences to cement their status as allies.ˆ

Then announcing their secession from the country, as if fighting murder with suicide: went on to seize all property within their reach, to declare community bondage of all to all, and to perish within a week. Their meager loot consumed, in the bloody hatred of all for all, in the chaos of no rule save that of the gun, to perish under the lethargic thrust of a few worn soldiers sent out from Washington to bring order to the ruins.²

Do not apologize for what is important – your personal happiness, ability, and achievement. The looters in government, media and city streets demand our acceptance of unearned guilt because its all they have.³

 

¹ Center for Individualism – Woke Society in America Will Not Allow You To Be Conservative Anymore

² Atlas Shrugged, Part III, Chapters 6 and 7

³ Center for Individualism – John Taylor Gatto Coached the Natural Individualism and Independence of His Students

ˆ Center for Individualism – In This Cultural Civil War We Must Kneel To Ask Forgiveness For Sins We Did Not Commit

Minimum Wage Legislation Cost This Foodservice Worker A Job, And Threatens To Destroy An Entire Industry.

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Seattle

This city’s minimum wage is rising to $16.39 an hour on Jan. 1. Instead of receiving a bigger paycheck, I’m left without any pay at all due to the policy change. That’s because the restaurant where I’ve worked for six years is closing as a consequence of the city’s harmful minimum-wage experiment.

I work for Tom Douglas, one of the best-known restaurateurs in Seattle. Mr. Douglas is in many ways responsible for the city’s reputation as a foodie paradise, and he recently celebrated his 30th anniversary in business. He’s a great boss, and his employees tend to stay at the company for a long time.

But being an established chef and a good employer doesn’t save you from the burden of a sharp minimum-wage increase, up 73% from $9.47 in 2015. For large-scale employers like Mr. Douglas, there’s no separate rate for workers who earn tips. In Washington and a handful of other states, tips aren’t counted as income earned on the job. That means restaurateurs are expected to pay servers like me the full minimum wage in addition to our considerable tip income.

When rent is too high, labor costs too much, and customers don’t want to pay $40 for a roast-chicken entree, the only way for many operators to ease the pain is to close.

So now, after six years working at Mr. Douglas’s restaurant Tanakasan, I need to find a new work home. My first thought was to go back to Sitka & Spruce, a restaurant where I had once worked. (I previously had to take on a second job there after the rising minimum wage forced Tanakasan to adopt a no-tipping payment model, drastically reducing my income.)

As it turns out, I can’t return to Sitka & Spruce. Its James Beard Award-winning owner, Matt Dillon, is closing Sitka after 14 years, defeated by the one-two punch of rising rents and labor costs.

As a worker, you’re attracted to restaurateurs like Messrs. Douglas and Dillon because they offer job security and you know you’ll make money. That’s no longer the case here with a high minimum wage that ignores tip income. I often hear people in Seattle lament that it’s becoming “more corporate.” The truth is that the city has made it nearly impossible for many small businesses to survive.

Mr. Douglas is trying to find a role for my co-workers and me at another restaurant in his group, but I’ve started applying for other open positions around town. I landed an interview at a restaurant called Super Bueno, owned by another established chef, Ethan Stowell. Before I could even confirm the interview, Mr. Stowell announced that he will close down Super Bueno at the end of the year. He’s also closing or restructuring two other restaurants.

I’ve lived in this city for almost 20 years, supporting my family thanks to the full-service-restaurant industry. Today I’m struggling because of a policy meant to help me. I’m proudly progressive in my politics, but my experience shows that progressives should reconsider minimum-wage laws that hurt the very workers they’re trying to protect.

Ms. Barron is a restaurant worker and co-founder of the Full Service Workers Alliance.

 

Seattle Proves That “Fight for Fifteen” Movement Will Have Negative Consequences

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The city of Seattle Washington is quickly becoming a cautionary tale when it comes to its economy. In May, the city even announced that it would begin levying a new employment tax on prosperous Seattle-based businesses. The “employment tax” as it is being called, will institute a new tax on the top 20 percent of businesses for each hour worked by each Seattle-based employee.

While this is absolutely absurd to tax job creators for creating value for Seattle, what is seemingly more absurd is the fact that the city hasn’t seemed to learn anything from its previous attempts to centrally plan its economy.

Fight for Fifteen

In many ways, Seattle is personally responsible for sparking the “fight for fifteen” movement. In 2014, it became the first municipality to vote in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour. At the time, the city’s minimum wage was only $9.47.

Jumping from less than ten dollars all the way to $15 was a dramatic increase. Even the city recognized the danger this posed on local businesses, who would be the ones responsible for finding the means to fund the new wage rate. So, it was decided that instead of the new minimum wage going into effect at the beginning of 2015, the city would do it incrementally.

After the first year, when the minimum wage had been increased from $9.47 to $11.00, a research team at the University of Washington began analyzing the effects it had on employment, specifically in the restaurant industry. As it turned out, the impact was minimal. For most people, the wage increase resulted in an extra 72 cents every few months. But what was most shocking to these researchers was the fact that low-wage employees, the very people who this was wage increase was supposed to help, were being negatively impacted. Low-wage employment was actually down in the year following the increase. But at the time the study was conducted, there simply wasn’t enough data to confirm how big of an impact the new wage rate was having. The city was going to have to wait a little longer before they could determine the impact.

Then, last summer, UC Berkeley joined in on the research and released their own new numbers declaring:

“Our results show that wages in food services did increase — indicating the policy achieved its goal. … Employment in food service, however, was not affected, even among the limited-service restaurants, many of them franchisees, for whom the policy was most binding.”

Of course, this gave city officials all the fuel the needed to start boasting that their initiative had been a success. However, right after then-Mayor Ed Murray has published the Berkeley findings on his own government page, bragging that wages in the fast food industry specifically had increased without negatively impacting employment rates, the University of Washington released its second installment of the study. And this one did not fit the city’s narrative.

Centrally Planned Economies Do Not Work

When the new study from University of Washington was released,  Bloomberg reported:

“The University of Washington released its second study, this one covering the increase from $11 an hour to $13. And this study found huge effects: For every 1 percent increase in their hourly wage, low-wage workers saw a 3 percent reduction in the number of hours worked. As a result, they lost about $125 in earnings a month, clawing back the entire gain from the earlier hike and more.”

As it turns out, money has to come from somewhere. And when employers are forced to pay more money to meet the wage requirements they have to cut hours or even cut positions in order to afford to do so.

Of course, the mayor couldn’t be troubled with these new inconvenient findings and stayed relatively quiet.

As new studies are about to be released, we are about to find out just how grave the numbers look after the wage has incrementally increased once again, quickly approaching $15.00 per hour.

But the data already provided does not do much to boost hope. And instead of trying to meddle in the market further like they are doing with the new employment tax, Seattle officials should seriously be considering the consequences of their actions.

While taxation and the minimum wage rate are not entirely the same, they both require the central planning of an entire economy, of which no good can come. A governing body that tries to control an entire economy will soon find they do not have enough knowledge or insight to do so. As Hayek reminds us, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” And when it comes to determining employee wages, the market will always do a better job than government. 

Seattle’s New “Employment Tax” Ignores Economic Logic

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Over the last several years, certain members of the Seattle City Council have embarked on a quest to make the city a socialist utopia. From raising the minimum wage to a whopping $15 an hour to instituting a ridiculous soda tax on consumers, Seattle loves to squeeze money from its residents and business owners in any way that it can.

On Monday, the City Council continued this pattern by voting to implement a new “employment tax” on large Seattle-based businesses. The city is justifying this tax on major job creators like Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing by blaming them for Seattle’s increase in homelessness. By the city’s logic, these companies have set the bar too high when it comes to employee wages. This has subsequently led to an increase in housing prices, which the city believes is responsible for the rise in homelessness.

By instituting this new tax, the city hopes to be able to build 1,780 low-income apartments over five years with the revenue collected. And while this tax was surely created with the best of intentions, the logic behind it falls flat. Punishing companies for voluntarily paying their employees generous salaries is so absurd, it sounds like a proposal straight from the mind of a Randian villain. But it also seems particularly ironic coming from the very same city officials who championed using force to incrementally raise the minimum wage just a few years ago.

And while the city has yet to acknowledge the detrimental impact this minimum wage increase has already had, they are also ignoring the potential consequences of this new tax. But if the city is not careful in considering both the seen and the unseen repercussions of this new employment tax, they might soon find that all the job creators have had enough.

Private Sector Opposition

Amazon has been one of the first companies to voice its opposition to this new employee “head” tax. And it is no surprise why. The tax would require every Seattle-based company with revenue over $20 million to pay 14 cents for each hour worked by Seattle residents. This adds up to about $275 per employee each year, which means that these companies will end up paying an estimated $47 million a year for five years. This is an outrageous demand for companies that are doing more for job and wealth creation than all of Seattle’s big-government programs put together. In fact, Amazon alone is responsible for creating over 40,000 jobs.

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener issued a statement saying:

“We are disappointed by today’s City Council decision to introduce a tax on jobs. While we have resumed construction planning for Block 18, we remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here.”

Amazon also questioned the city’s own spending habits when Herdener mentioned that the city revenue growth “far outpaces the Seattle population increase over the same time period. The city does not have a revenue problem — it has a spending efficiency problem.”

But Amazon is not alone in their opposition to this tax. Starbucks, another Seattle-based company, also has some grave concerns over the city’s apparent spending problem. Public affairs chief John Kelley commented on the matter saying that the city “continues to spend without reforming and fail without accountability…”

A group of Seattle tech leaders also stand in opposition to the tax, but that has not done much to deter the city government.

While Mayor Jenny Durkan was initially opposed to the original employment tax proposal, which was asking for 26 cents per hour worked for each employee, she seemed more than satisfied with the version that passed this week. She stated:

“This legislation will help us address our homelessness crisis without jeopardizing critical jobs. Because this ordinance represents a true shared solution, and because it lifts up those who have been left behind while also ensuring accountability and transparency, I plan to sign this legislation into law.”

But making such a bold claim about the impact, or lack thereof, that this new policy will have on job growth completely ignores the consequences that are not immediately seen.

The Seen and the Unseen

All actions have consequences, and when those actions are meant to control the economy, the consequences can have far reaching implications. In his essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” French economist Frédéric Bastiat explained that all government actions have consequences that are both immediately seen, and also consequences that are unseen.

He writes:

“In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.”

In the instance of the new Seattle employment tax, the “seen” is the revenue generated by the city through this new tax. But City Council members are so blinded by how this money can potentially decrease Seattle’s homeless problem that they fail to see how this tax may also have negative implications.

Unless you are the Federal Reserve, money is not simply printed out of thin air. And while the city government routinely ignores the economic realities that come with using other people’s money, the private sector understands that the money has to come from somewhere.

In order to pay for this new tax, which again taxes companies for each hour worked by employees, the obvious solution would be to lay off employees or cut back on employee hours, or both. Amazon is one of the largest employers in Seattle and forcing the company to lay off employees or trim the number of hours they can work will not serve to help the city’s homelessness problem. In fact, in many ways, it could be adding to it.

There is already a fear that automation will jeopardize human jobs. And while much of this fear is unfounded, by instituting a “head tax” on employers you are basically incentivizing them to move away from taxed labor and right into the arms of automation.  

Additionally, between the minimum wage increase and the new employment tax, there is also the possibility that these companies get completely fed up with Seattle and choose to leave the city altogether. Layoffs, reduced hours, and companies leaving are just a few of the “unseen” consequences of this new policy.

If only the Seattle City Council was wise enough to read Bastiat, they might be able to save themselves from a world of economic trouble. But the fact of the matter is, many politicians and legislators see only the immediate consequences, and completely ignore the “unseen.” However, economic realities can be ignored forever, anyone who doubts this fact need only look at the city of Detroit.

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