Brown put way too much faith into the power of minimum wage hikes to bind communities together. But he at least was honest about his understanding that government-imposed minimum wages don’t make sense economically.

If someone wants to hire someone for a given amount and there is someone willing to take them up on it, it shouldn’t be any business of the government to police what that amount is.

While the extent of economic distortion minimum wages cause is often mixed in the academic literature, when taken as a whole it is clear that minimum wages have many negative impacts.

A 2021 review of the relevant economic literature by researchers David Neumark and Peter Shirley published by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded,  “In its totality, this body of evidence and its conclusions point strongly toward negative effects of minimum wages on employment of less-skilled workers, especially for the types of studies that would be expected to reveal these negative employment effects most clearly.”

To assert that the economic literature hasn’t found this, the researcher noted, “requires discarding or ignoring most of the evidence.”

With all of this said, it is wholly unsurprising that a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research, this time by Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards and Jonathan Meer finds that California’s fast food minimum wage hike destroyed 18,000 jobs.

Recall that in late 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1228 into law, which established a Fast Food Council and a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers beginning, appropriately,  on April Fool’s Day 2024.

As we said of the bill at the time, “This is no way to help people. Markets based on consumer demand, not legislation and initiatives, should set wages. The controversy itself makes it more difficult, especially for locally owned mom-and-pop franchises, properly to run their businesses by increasing uncertainty.”

It’s no surprise that the California Legislature, in its desperation to serve union interests, destroyed jobs and made fast food even more expensive. It’s as though the Legislature didn’t consider the long-term impacts of its actions and only considered the short-term appeasement of special interests.

More often than not, the best thing the California Legislature could do is get out of the way of the private sector. The more they meddle, the more they scheme, the more they try to centrally plan, the worse things get.

Unfortunately, once government intervenes in the economy in this way, it is hard to pull back. The damage and distortion has been done. We can only hope that future legislators take this as a lesson to back off the next time they’re pressured to support higher minimum wages. They do more harm than good.

We thought about that quip after the VoiceofOC’s Norberto Santana Jr., sought the origins of the Orange County Board of Supervisors’ latest embarrassment. Who, exactly, came up with the idea of giving county supervisors a 25% pay hike? It passed on a four-to-one vote as part of the recent budget, but its origins are murky.

Finding its father isn’t just about dunking on supervisors. Santana pinpointed the first problem: It smacks of a coordinated effort “to place the item on the agenda without any fingerprints.” That suggests the board hasn’t learned lessons about transparency after the Andrew Do corruption scandal. If supervisors believed they deserved a big raise, they should have been transparent.

Second, the raise has emboldened the always self-interested public-employee unions, who have condemned the move. By using their political capital to secure a boost in their personal budgets, supervisors undermined their position in future salary negotiations. How can they oppose rank-and-file demands against this backdrop?

The only “no” vote came from Katrina Foley. She speculated to Santana that the board’s two Republicans, Don Wagner and Janet Nguyen, sponsored the plan. They were cagey. Nguyen reiterated her support for the measure in a sentence. Wagner said it came from the board—but didn’t say which particular supervisor initiated it—and (true to form) defended it in the context of other cost savings.

Perhaps it’s a moot point, but inquiring minds would like to know the details. Supervisors can start to make amends by fessing up—rather than just leaving the idea an orphan.

In a letter to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Trump said the higher levy would be imposed for two reasons. The first is the “international disgrace” of putting on trial former President Jair Bolsonaro, Trump’s friend, for allegedly plotting a coup to stay in power by overturning Lula’s 2022. The second is censoring U.S. social media companies.

It’s highly unlikely federal law “would permit the president to impose tariffs in response to a judicial ruling in Brazil,” Clark Packard told us; he’s a research fellow in U.S. international trade and investment law at the Cato Institute. And such tariffs “likely violate the United States’ commitments under World Trade Organization treaties.”

A further problem for us is Trump interfering in the internal affairs of another country. We can’t police all 193 members of the United Nations. What happened to America First?

About 30% of American java comes from Brazil. Switch to orange juice? It’s worse as 60% of imported orange juice is also from Brazil. Brazil also isn’t some small country Trump can push around. Its economy, based on the PPP number, is $4 trillion a year, eighth largest. Trump should drop the 50% tariff before he gives the two-thirds of U.S. adults who are coffee sippers the jitters.

In fact, we’re shocked it took a federal judge to rein in the Los Angeles Police Department’s unconscionable behavior, as police officers on multiple occasions reportedly fired rubber bullets, and used tear gas and physical force on reporters covering the protests. The lawsuit’s plaintiffs, including the Los Angeles Press Club and other journalists, cited 35 such instances in less than two weeks.

This abuse of reporters certainly limits their coverage of police behavior toward protesters. If it’s not officially sanctioned, then it’s tolerated. Why else would the department have fought this injunction? A responsible department would punish the perpetrators, be embarrassed to see civilian officers behave like members of paramilitaries in some third-world dictatorship, and would immediately order its halt. Apparently, LAPD is not a responsible department. Here’s hoping that victims find themselves experienced tort attorneys.

“Plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on their First Amendment claims and they are likely to suffer irreparable harm covering continuing protests in Los Angeles,” wrote federal Judge Hernán D. Vera, in granting a temporary restraining order against the department. “Indeed, given the fundamental nature of the speech interests involved and the almost daily protests throughout Southern California drawing media coverage, the identified harm is undoubtedly imminent and concrete.” Bravo.

The reported attacks are not even close calls. The ruling gave the example of a photojournalist who was fired upon multiple times with rubber bullets while documenting the protests from an overpass above the fracas. The photographer was wearing a vest emblazoned, “PRESS.” That identifier is not supposed to be a target. In one instance captured on video, an Australian TV reporter was being interviewed on camera dozens of feet from police. There were no protests nearby. Yet an officer “appears to aim” at her and hits her in the leg with a rubber bullet.

We’ve written regularly on these pages about the dangers of militarized policing, whereby officers view themselves more as an invading army than as civilian peacekeepers. The result is not just abuses against citizens and their constitutional rights, but the destruction of public trust in police officers and law enforcement in general. Protests come and go, but police must earn the trust of the communities they patrol if they want to fight crime and maintain order over the long term. LAPD just took a huge step backwards.

With his bombastic rhetorical approach and distinctive appearance, Milei has often been compared in the press to Donald Trump. But this is more superficial than anything.

While the two do share a revulsion toward wokeness and personally appear to be on friendly terms, Milei has actually worked aggressively to cut down the size and scope of government.

In his first year in office, Milei reduced government spending by nearly 30%. That’s quite unlike Trump’s recently approached Big Beautiful Bill, which will add trillions to the national debt.

According to Ian Vasquez of the Cato Institute, “Since coming to power, Milei has made wide-ranging cuts to Argentina’s bureaucracy. In his first year, he reduced the number of ministries from 18 to 8 (eliminating some and merging others), fired 37,000 public employees, and abolished about 100 secretariats and subsecretariats in addition to more than 200 lower-level bureaucratic departments.”

He has also reportedly repealed an average of two economic regulations per day since taking office.

The result?

Argentina turned a budget deficit into a budget surplus and saw inflation plummet from as much as 25% per month to below 2%.

As National Review reported earlier this month, the good news keeps coming: “Argentina’s economy is growing at 7.7 percent, according to the latest year-over-year data. It grew by 1.9 percent in April, the most recent month for which data are available.”

It turns out government isn’t the answer for everything and taking the boot off the neck of the private sector results in wealth and prosperity. Who knew?

In a lesson for California, Milei also repealed rent controls in Buenos Aires, which resulted in additional apartments coming to the market and better affordability for renters as a result of greater supply.

As renters in expensive cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco can attest, rent control hasn’t kept their cities particularly affordable.

“The functions of the state must once again be limited to defending the right to life, liberty and property,” Milei said in an address at Davos earlier this year. “Any other function the state assumes will come at the expense of its fundamental role and will inevitably lead to the ‘omnipresent Leviathan’ that we all suffer under today.”

This is a lesson American leaders ought to take to heart.

The heavy hand of government extends to far too many aspects of our lives, from our personal lives to our economic lives.

We would be much better off with a leaner government with a narrower focus than the bloated mess we have at the state and federal level today.

In an interview with the Bay Area News Group,  former California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones called for insurance companies to “bring lawsuits to recover money associated with the oil and gas companies’ contributions to climate change.”

This was his idea for how Californians can deal with soaring home insurance prices.

Jones blamed insurers for not bringing the lawsuits themselves.  “[T]hey can and should bring lawsuits to recover money associated with the oil and gas companies’ contributions to climate change,” he said.  “Why are they not bringing these lawsuits? I suspect it’s because they have over half a trillion dollars invested in the oil and gas industry.”

As an aside, one obvious explanation is that suing companies they invest in would reduce the insurers’ net worth, bringing shareholder lawsuits.

To prompt such lawsuits against Big Oil, Jones said the state should “pass laws” to make the insurers sue oil and gas companies to reclaim money lost from claims supposedly caused by climate change.

Setting aside the challenge of parsing how guilty oil companies are for natural catastrophes, Jones doesn’t stop to consider that any such costs would be passed along to consumers. Think gas prices are high now? Wait until energy producers are blamed for everything.

Jones also insisted the state pass laws “to require that insurers transition their investments out of oil and gas.”

But if oil companies turn out to be more profitable than other investments, the insurance companies’ value would drop.

To make up for that loss, they would have to increase premiums on homeowners.

No matter how Jones tries to spin things, his solutions are half baked and costly.

The real crisis in homeowners’ insurance costs in California is not whatever is happening with the climate.

In January, when the Pacific Palisades and Eaton wildfires boosted home insurance premiums, Ryan Bourne and Sophia Bagley pointed out the actual problem with California’s insurance system.

Rate regulations, imposed by Proposition 103 in 1988, “led to rules preventing companies from recalibrating prices to fully reflect what they believed were higher future wildfire risks after 2017.”

Cato also noted the California Department of Insurance imposed price caps on policies, keeping them cheap, thus artificially encouraging building in fire-prone areas. It’s a classic case of unintended consequences at work.

“Market prices thus serve as signals, telling homeowners, policymakers, and developers about the true costs of building and living in wildfire-prone areas, “By capping insurance rates below what market conditions demanded, California muted these warning signals for some homeowners, forcing companies to price below expected cost and making consumers feel safer than they were.”

Between 2017 and 2022, the first two years of which Jones was commissioner, the department was the most draconian of the 50 states in imposing “rate suppression.”  In other words, Jones himself helped spark the home insurance crisis by tampering with prices.

Then consider the litany of other government failures in preventing and responding to natural disasters like wildfires, including abysmal state investment in prevention.

It’s a lot easier to scapegoat Big Oil, we’re sure, but Dave Jones is quite obviously the wrong person to be listening to.  His vision is one of perpetually ineffective insurance markets and even more expensive energy.  That’s precisely the wrong approach for California.

As the city’s grand jury reported in June, the program was “adopted in San Francisco in 2014 with the aim of eliminating traffic deaths by 2024” but “has failed by its own metrics. Instead of getting to zero fatalities, 2024 marked the deadliest year since 2007.” Santa Ana and Los Angeles County have also adopted these programs, but they’re still far from their deadlines.

The obvious point is communities ought to focus on realistic plans that improve traffic mobility and safety rather than on public-relations-oriented ones—who doesn’t want to eliminate traffic fatalities?—that don’t accomplish anything.

The debate over San Francisco’s failure raised another fascinating issue.

The grand-jury report blamed a lack of police enforcement of traffic laws, noting that the police there handed out 90% fewer traffic citations last year compared to 2014. Deaths were a tad higher a decade later, but close to flat—amazing considering the drop in enforcement.

Keying off of that report, the San Francisco Standard analyzed two decades of traffic data and found it “shows little correlation between enforcement levels and the number of deaths or severe injuries of pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists.”

Some experts, it reported, argue that traffic enforcement should instead focus on the most dangerous driving behaviors, but the Standard’s data analysis didn’t find much of a correlation, either, although the data did show some correlations in other areas.

“It makes you question the argument that enforcement is the thing that’s needed,” Julia Griswold, director of UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, told the Standard. “The level of enforcement you’d need to have sustained effects is maybe not feasible.”

This largely confirms what libertarians have long argued: People largely police themselves with regard to traffic. And street engineering and vehicle design, automated systems and drivers’ culture plays a bigger role in improving safety that paying more police officers to write more tickets, which inevitably focus on minor infractions.

We’re not against some traffic enforcement, but it’s not the right focus area.  Municipalities need to stop making empty promises that rely on outmoded thinking.

Boss: “What do you mean I can’t tell a lunch room joke about Jane having a hangnail last week?”

Lawyer: “You just can’t. Get used to it.”

HIPAA — the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — is a federal law passed in 1996 that created national standards to protect the privacy and security of individuals’ health information.

If its strictures can be annoying, now is not the time to be particularly annoyed by them. The assault on our privacy is escalating at all levels. We need to do everything we can to protect it from assault by everyone from online scammers to legitimate Big Tech social media that will do anything they can to know everything they can about our consumer habits and our finances.

And we need to do everything we can as well to stop government at all levels from snooping everywhere and breaking into our private affairs like the collective common crook government sometimes is.

Our health records are, by law, private. We applaud anyone who works to keep them that way.

Yes, we fully realize that California Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Banta are probably — OK, certainly — a bit trigger-happy when it comes to suing the federal government in this time of  Washington, D.C.’s ongoing assault on blue-state California policies.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate reasons to push back in order to protect Californians. And so we applaud Bonta for on Tuesday leading a coalition of states that filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration for sharing Medicaid — what we call Medi-Cal — recipients’ health data with immigration enforcement agencies.

“Bonta cited news reports that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services granted what it described as ‘unfettered access’ to individuals’ health records,” Sharon Bernstein reports in the Sacramento Bee. “He said the action violated privacy laws and long-standing practices separating Medicaid information from law enforcement.”

“I’m sickened by this latest salvo in the president’s anti-immigrant campaign,” Bonta said in a statement. “We’re headed to court to prevent any further sharing of Medicaid data — and to ensure any of the data that’s already been shared is not used for immigration enforcement purposes.”

The current White House is certainly determined to carry through on its campaign promise to get tough on illegal immigration and to deport millions of people. Trump won the last election fair and square and he will work hard to do what he told voters he would. But that doesn’t mean that in doing so he and his administration have the right to break the law in order to enforce American immigration regulations. The lawsuit also names Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.  It was filed in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of California and 19 other states, noting that “the administration changed its privacy policies without going through the process of holding hearings or announcing changes in its regulations,” the Bee reports.

“In June, 2025, the federal government’s policy of keeping State Medicaid agencies’ healthcare records confidential abruptly changed, without notice, opportunity for public input, or reasoned decision-making,” the complaint filed by the 20 states says.

We hope the suit prevails and that medical privacy is restored.

Reviving an old proposal, Assemblymember Catherine Stefani of San Francisco has proposed Assembly Bill 699.

Stefani describes the bill as “smart, good government policy that enhances transparency while ensuring local jurisdictions can continue to work in partnership with their local communities in support of vital infrastructure.”

For Stefani, what it means for “local jurisdictions,” meaning government, to work with their “local communities,” meaning taxpayers, to “work in partnership” is when taxpayers agree to fork over more of their money to local governments.

Stefani calls it a “serious problem” that, under current law, local ballot measures imposing or raising taxes must include the amount of money raised, the duration of the tax and the tax rate.

This is a problem, apparently, because, “Requiring that financial measures be explained to a voter in a 75-word ballot label can be too restrictive and can lead to confusion and at times can be misleading to voters.” Stefani complains this “has led to lower passage rates and jurisdictions deciding not to go to the ballot at all.”

Allow us a moment to grieve all the local governments that find it hard to punish their residents and businesses with higher taxes.

Stefani’s remedy to this challenge is to remove the requirement that local measures include such pesky details as how much local government wants to take from them in the ballot statement.

Instead, such information could be replaced by, “See county voter guide for detailed tax rate information.”

Here in the real world, few people are actually going to do that, which Stefani knows and which tax-hikers are banking on to improve their chances of getting their measures through.

An analysis of the bill from the  Senate Committee on Local Governments itself notes this: “Voters who do not have the time to review the information could end up not fully aware of how the measure may affect them. Does AB 699 tip the scales too far in the favor of local governments and initiative proponents seeking to pass new taxes and bonds?”

Even so, the Senate committee actually ended up approving the bill on July 2, with Sens. Arreguín, Cabaldon, Durazo, Laird and Wiener advancing it. Southern California Sens. Steven Choi and Kelly Seyarto wisely voted against it. Keep watch on who votes for the bill if it makes it to the floor and hold it against any of the supposed “moderate” Democrats who vote for it. The bill already cleared the Assembly on a 54-20 vote. Some sensible moderate Democrats like Asm. Cottie Petrie-Norris and Jasmeet Bains voted against it. But unfortunately most Democratic politicians think Californians really need to be taxed more.

Well, it’s certainly politics as usual, and we’re actually all in for eye-rolls if they help quash the urge to otherwise holler at a colleague in public when they make a statement as petty as Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez did last week, causing Councilmember Traci Park to roll her eyes, as Noah Goldberg and David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times reported last week after reviewing videotape.

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez then had “some sharp words for both of them.”

Not us. The least Park could do in the interest of all Angelenos who are interested in a strong economy that produces jobs that support Los Angeles families is to roll her eyes at statements made by misguided backers of the current plan to create a $30 minimum hourly wage at L.A. hotels and LAX. It’s quite simply an unsustainable number picked out of the blue by union organizers who’ve never run a business or met a payroll. It’s a recipe for economic calamity in the Southland. And Park’s reply to the nonsense is one of the most cogent we’ve seen:

Unite Here union co-President “Kurt Petersen is killing jobs and tanking our local economy. Iconic restaurants are closing, airport workers are being replaced by kiosks, hotels are pulling out and working families are losing, not winning. His divisive and reckless tactics are speeding up automation and driving opportunity out of Los Angeles.”

Cole’s French Dip, the oldest restaurant in Los Angeles — not that the Downtown icon is a hotel, or at LAX, but it’s part of the same hospitality economy — isn’t closing because it’s no good (it’s great) or unpopular (it’s often quite crowded). It’s closing because labor costs — along with other costs — have gone up so much its owners can’t afford to stay in business without raising menu prices so high no one would patronize it.

And what L.A. can’t afford is a City Council dedicated to making it even harder for hospitality businesses to succeed — just in time for the 2028 Olympics. We hope a petition drive aimed at letting voters decide if the $30 wage is sustainable makes it to the ballot and that it prevails.