The ever receding socialist paradise

San Francisco, passing a $15-an-hour minimum wage law, is predictably losing fast food joints at a phenomenal rate. After all, when the price of a burger reaches that of a steak, burgers lose out. Now the genii in government ponder a law requiring workers to eat out – that is, to leave work to eat somewhere else. That won't help, either, since people can always brown-bag it. The lefty knuckleheads in San Fran are discovering that their socialist paradise gets farther away every time they try to short-circuit supply and demand. Like it or not, believe it or not, God set up the world to operate according to logical principle. Higher costs, such as those for labor, drive up the price of goods and services. That's not hard to understand if you live in the real world. Even chimpanzees go elsewhere if a leopard lives in the banana tree, making a banana from that tree too costly.

Chimpanzees are smarter than the smarties who run San Fran and Noo Yawk City, where the bosses keep trying – and failing – to ignore the principles of economics. These two great cities, one on each coast, once attracted talent from all over the world. Today, people flee both because dreamy-eyed socialists have made life just about impossible. It's hard to feel pity for many of them because, after all, they put these fools in office. Some time ago, a guy who mostly talked nonsense told us that elections have consequences. Almost nothing else that guy said was true, but he got this one thing right. You get what you vote for. It's just a shame that the ones paying the price in Frisco and NYC – the owners who risked their own money in pursuit of an honest living – are losing everything to officials who couldn't make a decent burger if their lives depended on it. But you can be sure they feel infinitely superior to those whose lives they've ruined. You gotta watch whom you put in office.