These roles have caused inefficiencies within each industry, taking money and resources away from what needs to be done in order to pour it down the endless drain of bureaucracy. Instead of prioritising efforts to what serves the customer the best, organizations and companies are forced to prioritised what is politically correct.

https://mises.org/wire/how-british-efforts-enforce-equality-have-led-woke-totalitarianism

Jess Gill

From the Equal Pay Act 1970 to the Equality Act 2010, there has been a wave of legalization in Britain to turn the state into some omniscient being that can determine the intentions of an employer. While these pieces of legislation did not enforce direct quotas onto businesses, they have increased inefficiencies through the increase in human resources roles for companies and organizations to cover their own backs.

These pieces of anti-discrimination legislation assumes that the state can determine the intentions of an employer. There are many reasons why an employer may not hire somebody or give an employee higher pay. However, the government cannot possibly know their reasoning. This leads to employers overcompensating in order to escape the government punishing them for employing whoever they wish.

Lew Rockwell encapsulates this perfectly:

Imagine that the government appoints a party planner who says that you can invite or not invite whoever you want, provided that one consideration is not part of the mix: you must not decline to invite someone on the grounds of hair color. Now, it may never have occurred to you to think along these lines. But now you have to. You notice that you have no redheads attending the party, much to your alarm.

What if this fact is taken as evidence that you are discriminating? Will it? You can’t know for sure. You think again: even if no redheads are coming, this is surely not the reason why you are not inviting them. There are other factors, too many factors to name. In any case, how can the state’s party planner know what your motivations are? Isn’t it astounding that a government agency would presume to read your mind, know your heart, and discern your innermost emotions and motives?

Truly this is totalitarian.

Over the past decades, those who believe that equality of outcome must be due to discrimination has come to the mainstream. Modern day feminists demand the abolition of the gender pay gap as if it is due to sexism. The Black Lives Matter movement has led to critical race theory becoming mainstream, an ideology which believes that any race inequality must be due to racism. These demands are an attack on private property and free enterprise.

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Be seeing you

https://mises.org/wire/fed-making-it-it-goes-so-it-ditched-forward-guidance

The fact the Fed has no idea how things will go is emphasized by Powell’s admission that the Fed isn’t planning to offer any more forward guidance this year, which frees it up to make more last-minute decisions and to more aggressively make things up as it goes. Specifically, Powell said that moving forward “we think it’s time to just go to a meeting by meeting basis, and not provide the kind of clear guidance that we did on the way to neutral.”

Translation: “Things might go even more off the rails at any time, so let’s just play it by ear.”

Ryan McMaken

The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee announced Wednesday it is raising its key policy rate—the federal funds rate—by 75 basis points to 2.5 percent. According to the FOMC’s press release, the committee recognizes that economic activity is declining but that Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation also “remains elevated”:

Recent indicators of spending and production have softened. Nonetheless, job gains have been robust in recent months, and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation remains elevated, reflecting supply and demand imbalances related to the pandemic, higher food and energy prices, and broader price pressures.

The committee goes on to state that with these conditions in mind, it will raise the target rate in order to “achieve … [CPI] inflation at the rate of 2 percent over the longer run.” Moreover, the committee states it “will continue reducing its holdings of Treasury securities and agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities.”

There were not many surprises here. Most Fed watchers were predicting a 75 basis point increase, and that’s what the Fed delivered.

This then leaves us with the question of what now. The Fed doesn’t know, and the weakness of the present economy will keep the Fed very cautious moving forward.

As is clear from Powell’s press conference Wednesday, following the release of the FOMC statement, the Fed is still holding out hope for a “soft landing” in which it can significantly reduce inflation without sizably reducing employment or causing a greatly weakened economy.

How the economy will react to the Fed’s changes remains a complete mystery to the Fed, however, as has long been clear. It only took six weeks, after all, for the Fed to go from a stance of “economic activity appears to have picked up” (at the June meeting) to noting how “recent indicators of spending and production have softened” (in its July report).

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