Loose Ends (94)

 The New York Times had a whimsical story over the weekend about vegetarians and vegans who gave it up to be come butchers.  The best parts of the story:

Before she was a butcher, Ms. Kavanaugh was a strict vegetarian. She stopped eating meat for more than a decade, she said, out of a deep love for animal life and respect for the environment. . .  She returned to eating meat after learning that the soybean and corn monocultures that accounted for much of her vegan diet were wreaking havoc on the environment.

Those darn tradeoffs! They always get in the way of virtue-mongering. More:

Ms. Fernald, 44, became a vegetarian as a teenager. . . After spending her high school and college years subsisting on a vegetarian diet of flavored yogurt, Gardenburgers, pizza pocketsand mac and cheese with frozen vegetables mixed in, she began eating meat again in Europe, where she worked on farms for a few years.

“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.”

Good animal protein will have that effect. Heh.

Chaser—The Economist, from back in May:

Global meat-eating is on the rise, bringing surprising benefits; As Africans get richer, they will eat more meat and live longer, healthier lives

The failure of the higher minimum wage has become so obvious that even the lamestream media can’t ignore it. The Wall Street Journal‘s news pages (not ever to be confused with their splendidly sound editorial pages) ran a story on Tuesday about the woes the higher minimum wage in New York City is exacting on both employees, who are seeing their hours cut and overtime opportunities eliminated, and employers, who are seeing their thin margins eliminated:

More than six months after the $15 minimum wage went into effect in New York City, business leaders and owners say the increased labor costs have forced them to cut staff, eliminate work shifts and raise prices.

Many business owners said these changes were unintended consequences of the new minimum wage, which took effect at the beginning of the year.

Gosh, if only someone could have warned New York about those “unintended consequences.” It’s almost as if someone didn’t warn the coyote that gravity would pull him to the ground if he chased the road runner off the cliff. (Strangely, the coyote, like modern liberals, never learns from experience.)

My pal Mark Perry pulls the recent news coverage together in an omnibus post over at AEI on “The Canary in the Coal Mine,” to which he adds this stunning chart showing that restaurant employment in New York City is mimicking recessionary trends:

A few more minimum wage hikes and we’ll likely get the recession Democrats so ardently wish to see.

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