Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   9/16/2014

CA undermines volunteer, entry-level opportunities

The Tea Party Patriots will host both Sandy Bruce and Candy Carlson, runoff candidates for District 2 Supervisor, tonight at 6:30 at the Westside Grange; they will each give a statement and answer questions.

There sure is a lot of news that accumulates over the course of 2 months of vacation-held Daily News issues. Even utilizing the “epageflip” digital version doesn’t allow for the time to grasp many articles’ newsworthiness. So it was that the headline “No More Popping Tags on Main” from July 10 failed to convey a rather blatant lesson on life in the “happy volunteer workers paradise” of California, as well as a larger revelation on the sheer hypocrisy of the counterproductive over-regulation of the private sector. (Hint: this would not happen under the purview of the State of Jefferson.)

There should be some clear lessons for our liberal friends over the inflexibility of labor laws and regulations as applied to service and charitable operations. Whatever happened to the America that French observer Alexis de Tocqueville found in the 1800s? He marveled at the ability, eagerness and effectiveness of private citizens volunteering to organize and marshal themselves into ad hoc groups to resolve problems—meet social needs—without waiting for a governmental entity to tell them what to do.

In the case of the Poor And The Homeless organization, its thrift store served the dual purpose of providing both a cash flow for PATH, as well as opportunities for those struggling to integrate into a productive role in society; they learn basic skills that could serve their move into the mainstream economy. No one should begrudge such groups the wherewithal to fashion a “path” for making such efforts work for all involved. Enter inflexible, mandated labor regulations, rules and bureaucrats whose existence depends on pronouncing and proclaiming what shall be, regardless of practicality and efficaciousness.

There is no more reason for forcing such volunteer-fueled operations to meet the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement minimum wage rules than there is for forcing those same minimum wage rules onto businesses hiring unskilled teenagers whose economic worth is a fraction of what they must be paid. Oh, but that’s a whole different situation, some on the left will say. Well, the way I see it, the institutional left—in the form of advocacy groups, academic institutions, environmental outfits, etc.—depends on the whole “intern” (meaning unpaid) staffing concept. (Maybe PATH should just call them “interns”)

Even groups whose purpose, at least in part, is to agitate and demonstrate for such loony concepts as a “$15 minimum/living wage” have unpaid interns. Graduate students at our predominantly liberal/left-leaning universities instruct students so that tenured, highly-paid professors needn’t actually teach all their classes. A truism oft stated is that if someone will learn to make themselves worth more than they are being paid, they will eventually be paid more than they are worth.

Only a small minority of workers remains in the lowest rungs of the economy their whole lives. It is patently obvious that when minimum wage and other labor laws impose an artificial floor for compensation (that many are not worth), they don’t get the basic skills and habits that help them advance to higher paying positions. Hence, liberal inspired laws designed to artificially compensate entry-level workers have the unintended effect of depriving those same unskilled people of the very skills they need to start to advance in life. All I can say is “good luck” to the volunteers that will now have little or no “path” to gain what they need to reintegrate in a self-supporting way into society.

On another topic, sometimes I really doubt that leftist advocates have the slightest sense of their own hypocritical silliness. Some anonymous (of course) online commenter actually stated that I’ve become “disloyal and unpatriotic” for my “partisan bickering against a freely elected leader of this country…” (I’m wearing my best imitation of Jon Stewart’s funny/mocking face). Does anyone remember when the Democrat left injected lie after lie after lie into the public debate about President George Bush?

Some of those lies were fully intended to undermine our deployed military as well as recruiting efforts here at home. They were the kind of lies that, in WWII, were part of the “Tokyo Rose” and “Axis Sally” propaganda efforts to demoralize our troops and aviators. Does anyone remember “the war is lost” and “the surge has failed” rhetoric? Then the left, faced with legitimate criticism for such irresponsible claims, accused us of “questioning their patriotism,” even when not one Republican ever actually did.

So, I will happily, gleefully throw these words back at such leftist trash-talkers: “I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. And we should stand up and say, ‘We are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.’” (A shrill, screaming Hillary Clinton, April 28^th, 2003, Hartford, Connecticut) Please spare us your hypocritical double standard, leftists.