My rather extreme liberal political and socio-economic leanings are no secret. But, like most others, I have very close friends with vast amounts of knowledge on different subjects and impeccable critical thinking abilities in their professional field, but somehow obsessed with the following two things:

• hating Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom, and
• the dreadful thought that, God forbid, some of their tax dollars might be given to some miserable fraudsters whose level of criminality amounts to abusing the limited social safety nets in the society.

And, in recent years, this obsession has gone insofar as preferring a pathological lier and text-book narcissist to run the country, many knowing full well that he is there only to line his own pockets and funnel money/bribes from foreign nations and dignitaries into his own or his friends’ and family’s businesses.

Before I get to the main subject of this post, I wanted to briefly comment on the above two concerns:

• I don’t think anyone on the left has any alegience to anybody, even former presidents including Clinton, Obama, or Biden, let alone other political figures such as Nancy Pelosi or Gavin Newsom. When Bob Menendez and his wife were indicted, by the Justice Department of a Democratic president, for bribery, and convicted and sentenced accordingly, I don’t remember anyone calling the prosecutors deranged, the judge a lunatic, and any critic “enemy from within.” Same when Cuomo lost his governorship due to a sex scandal. And I don’t expect any such thing if Bill Clinton is indicted for and convicted of sex trafficking in relation to the Epstein’s case, nor if Pelosi and her husband are indicted for and convicted of insider trading. The justice system including the DoJ should be independent enough to be able to bring charges and seek conviction of proven criminals under administrations from either party.
• It is impossible to create a benefit system without any possibility of waste, fraud, and abuse. While every government should strive to eliminate waste and fraud and minimize abuse, it is ultimately going to be a trade off between missing some who deserve the benefit (the probability of missed detection) and allowing some, who do not deserve the benefits, to abuse the system (probability of false alarm). This is not limited to social safety programs. You can find examples in private practice as well, most notably in the form of insurance fraud. Bottom line is where the threshold should be set, or rather how much abuse the system should tolerate to ensure that most deserving individuals receive the benefit. For the justice system, the threshold should be very high. As one 18th century judge is famously quoted, it is better to have ten criminals go unpunished than one innocent be punished. For the social safety systems this kind of threshold is admittedly too high, but expecting it to be zero is also very unrealistic. You can think about it yourself whether the current levels in the order of a few percentage points is acceptable or not, and whether that level of abuse can justify removing such programs altogether in favor of wealthier individuals throwing a few dollars at homeless people, sick or disabled individuals, or needy children, who could end up living on the streets.

Now, back to the subject line of this post. A friend was recently arguing that it is the minimum wage requirement that is the cause of inflation, and that the government should not be in the business of telling businesses how much they should pay their employees. He continued by saying that, those minimum wage jobs are anyways not real work but rather a form of vacation for which even that minimum wage itself is probably too much. Unlike me, this fried of mine is a big shot manager and quite wealthy. So I asked him whether he is willing to take that vacation for a little while and work any minimum wage job of his own choosing while receiving his current full salary? As you can imagine, I am still waiting for a response, and doubt that I will ever get one.