 MSNBC's Stephanie Rule appeared to say the quiet part out loud yesterday when she told host and former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki that under liberal economic policies, things are just more expensive. Despite all of this positivity, he has the overhang of inflation. So you and I can sit here and talk about all of this good stuff, but people's lived experience day in, day out. Their car insurance, buying a car, their rent, the grocery store, going to a restaurant, life is expensive. And is corporate greed partially to blame? Absolutely. But that is just part of the story. And you know, it is really good news that we're seeing wages grow up, right? Go up in California, minimum wage is about to go to $20 an hour. That's great news for our labor force. And while that shouldn't automatically mean we should expect higher prices, it is what we end up getting. So if you own a small business out there, Jen, if you own a sandwich shop and you are now paying your employees more money and that's going to help retain employees, it's going to help attract employees, in the end, you might end up charging more because all sorts of your input costs are going up. It's something we have to currently get used to, but it makes this to be a difficult communications challenge. And that's your expertise for the White House. You can almost sense Saki's horror at this obvious truth being stated so plainly by someone I'm sure she considers an ally in the ideological struggle. Of course, if you artificially or by law force employers to pay people higher wages that that doesn't occur in a vacuum, they will compensate by raising prices on the service they offer. And then you end up in a place where are you actually making anyone better off on net? This is exactly what's contributing. One of the factors contributing to inflation. So I'm good on Stephanie Ruhl for stating a obvious and well-cited and well-resourced economic fact, even though it's not inconvenient, perhaps, for Team Biden. Yeah. And you know, this is a rare moment of honesty for Stephanie Ruhl. I used to watch her show a lot back when I was a media reporter and she used to have this afternoon show with Allie Velshey. And they were one of the most, I mean, riddled with falsehood shows on MSNBC, which is saying a lot. And so this is kind of refreshing to hear from her, but you're exactly right. There are obviously trade-offs to raising the minimum wage. You're going to have knock-on economic effects. And you know, some businesses, instead of raising their prices, will actually just lay off workers and switch to technological replacements. I mean, this is why probably 50% of the McDonald's you go in nowadays only have one employee behind the register because they have six of these digital screens that you can put your order in on. And you're taking away the opportunity for part-time laborers, for high school and college kids, younger workers to enter the economy for the first time, really build up some equity, build up some wealth, or at least just be able to pay for their schooling and take some of the burden off of their parents. And they don't really get to do that anymore. And I've noticed too that in a lot of the jobs in my hometown that were traditionally filled by these team workers, you actually now have a lot of people from other countries coming in on visas who are filling those jobs. And so I think that's unfortunate too. I definitely think it's unfortunate, especially if it's like an artificial government constraint on people being able to do these jobs. There has been this whole move towards stigmatizing, I think, sort of summer jobs, jobs for high school kids. Yeah, like I don't think a 12-year-old should be like laboring in the salt mine or the factory instead of being at work. Fine, you win liberals, but I think it's totally fine for like an eighth grader, ninth grader, tenth grader to work at McDonald's like for a couple extra hours during summers or on vacations or weekends or something. And that is being treated like child abuse these days by many take-havers in the mainstream media that I think is just like totally, it can be good and healthy for young people to do, again, somewhere they shouldn't be doing it instead of school. They shouldn't be like suddenly the single providers for their family. But it seems fine to me to have kids do a reasonable amount of yard work or fast food work or whatever that is. There was a recent backlash towards a state law that was changed to, I think, lower the age for which you have to get a permit to be able to work. And I think it might have been Florida, but you're right. There was this huge backlash of people claiming that we were going back to the Industrial Revolution when 10-year-olds were basically in the Cheerios factory getting their fingers chopped off because they had to fill boxes so quickly. And I always found, you know, the work that I did when I was a teenager was extremely rewarding. It felt amazing to have my own income that I could use to buy things that I wanted. I was able to save up some for college so that I didn't have to work while I was in school. I only had to work during the summers. And coming from like a low to middle income family, that was hugely important for me and for my parents to be able to have that opportunity. And so I think it's really shameful that people are trying to, one, criminalize that and also make it out to be some form of abuse, as you said. I think a lot of kids in the younger generations would actually probably end up better off if they had to work a little bit harder in their younger years. Yeah, and they might be happy to do so. We're talking a lot these days about the anxious generation, the new Jonathan Haidt book about pointing to smartphones and social media addiction as being so bad for kids. And I think a lot of what he says and has found is insightful. I've pushed back and some of my colleagues at Reason have pushed back on many of the solutions he's offering in terms of having the government more involved in restricting these things for kids. But I totally agree with the basic point that it is healthier for kids instead of spending all their time on social media. Just like if they were spending all their time on video games or on the computer or staring at a TV screen, that would not be good. They should get outside. They should get some exercise. They should do work. They should do an extracurricular activity. They should do something to stimulate their minds. And that is good. And taking away, again, again, I don't need to spend all their time doing manual labor or something. But taking away options for young people to occupy their time other than just staring at a screen, why would we do that? And an important part, too, of Haidt's book talked about the need for young people to socialize face to face and in person. And for a lot of people, the first time that they really interact with adults on an equal basis is when they're working in one of these roles, like in fast food service. I mean, granted, a lot of boomers look down on food service workers and aren't very nice to them. But it's kind of the first time they have those interactions with adult strangers. And one of the keys to getting over anxiety is actually putting yourself in situations that make you anxious, that are low stakes and force you to get over it. I mean, what better way than taking someone's order at a drive-through? Or I used to work at a pool, and I would have to tell adults they couldn't come in because they didn't have their pool passes. And it taught me how to have a backbone. I mean, these things are richly rewarding for young people and really can't help them grow into functioning, healthy adults. And again, we continue to take these things away and replace it with phones, with coddling and parents, a lot of parents in the millennial generation I think went so far in the other direction of their own parents who were either not present or were extremely strict and decided to be their kid's friend and were reaping the consequences. And to some extent, those things were forced on them, I would argue, by changing cultural and social norms. And even, frankly, by explicit government pressure, my friend and colleague, Lenore Scanesi, writes about all of these terrible laws that came into being after reasonable concerns about rising crime in the 80s and early 90s with this idea that if you ever let your kid out of your sight, you're a negligent parent, ever letting your kid walk to school or play at the park by themselves or having an older sibling, watch a younger sibling in your own house, in your own backyard, that sort of stuff became widely criminalized and there's all these cases of child services and the police getting involved in parental decisions where it is a no-brainer that it was perfectly within the realm of safety to let kids have this sort of autonomy that, you know, we walk to school as kids, our parents walk to school as kids. Frankly, in situations that at times where crime was way worse in many urban and rural communities, so that all got criminalized and I think parents, unfortunately, many of them felt they had no choice but to do this helicopter parenting. And socially now, it's frowned upon to either leave your kid alone or allow an older kid to watch a younger kid because they say that it can cause trauma in children. I kid you not, they call it parentification now where an older child is perhaps responsible for the younger children and so they, a lot of people on the left really don't like when people have big families because they think it forces the older kids to grow up too quickly, which is a form of abuse. I mean, this is like the deranged kind of thinking we're talking about. We have over-applied the word trauma to way too many situations and I'm traumatized just thinking about it. We'll be back with more right after this.