As of July, CBS News reports, Florida’s unemployment rate stood at 2.7% versus 3.5% nationwide. Most economists consider an unemployment rate of 5% or less to constitute “full employment”:  People without jobs in such a scenario are either in the process of changing jobs, or just not looking for work.

The problem in Florida right now, after nearly a year-and-a-half of economic growth, isn’t unemployment. It’s unfilled job openings. Florida has 588,000 of those. Employers are begging someone, anyone, to please come collect a paycheck.

If you live in Florida, you don’t need the news to tell you that. You see the “help wanted” signs everywhere you go, advertising well above minimum wage … along with reduced hours due to staff shortages.

Governor Ron DeSantis’s response to those growing pains? He’s rounding up workers and sending them to Massachusetts at taxpayer expense.

“Yes,” DeSantis spokesperson  Taryn Fenske told Fox News on September 14, “Florida can confirm the two planes with illegal [sic] immigrants that arrived in Martha’s Vineyard today were part of the state’s relocation program to transport illegal  [sic] immigrants to sanctuary destinations.”

If that doesn’t make any sense to you, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. DeSantis’s priority isn’t his state’s economy or its residents’ quality of life. It’s positioning himself to run for president in 2024 or 2028.

To assist himself in that positioning, he’s been tapping taxpayer money as, essentially, campaign contributions for some time now.

Last year, he blew millions sending Florida cops to Texas on a “border mission” to assist governor Greg Abbott in some immigration-based political clownery. Apparently they were fresh out of crime to fight in Florida after DeSantis rewarded his police union cronies by seizing power to stop local governments from reducing their law enforcement budgets.

This week’s Martha’s Vineyard stunt is just a carbon copy of Abbott’s “bus them to Chicago” nonsense. Like the police funding and “border mission” capers, it imposes additional costs on Floridians above and beyond the raw taxpayer dollar numbers.

Fewer immigrants in Florida means fewer job openings filled. It means shorter store hours. It means crops rotting in fields instead of getting picked. It means fewer houses and apartments getting built. It means fewer paychecks being spent in stores that CAN find workers.

Ron DeSantis is running for president at the expense of Florida’s voters and taxpayers. Maybe they should think about that before they give him another term as governor.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) doesn’t like ranked choice voting. It’s “a scam to rig elections,” he tweeted on August 31, after Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Republican Sarah Palin in a special election for US House in Alaska.  “60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat ‘won.'”

What he leaves out of that claim is that 60% of Alaska voters didn’t vote for “a” Republican. They split their first-choice votes between TWO Republicans, with Peltola getting more votes than either Palin or Nick Begich. Peltola was the second choice of enough voters to give her a majority in the “instant runoff” with Palin.

If this had been a standard “first past the post” election in which a candidate could achieve victory with a mere plurality, Peltola would have won that way too: She received 39.57% of first-round votes to Palin’s 30.79% and Begich’s 28.09%. The ranked choice “instant runoff” merely confirmed that a majority of Alaska’s voters, rather than a mere plurality, preferred Peltola to Palin.

Cotton’s sour grapes tweeting reflects his sense of party entitlement, not any opposition to “rigging elections.”

In point of fact, Cotton’s campaign went to great lengths to “rig” the 2020 US Senate election in Arkansas, sitting on negative opposition research about sole Democratic candidate Josh Mahony until after the filing deadline so that he could hopefully coast to victory in a two-way race with Libertarian Ricky Dale Harrington.

As it turned out, Cotton wasn’t able to clear 2/3 of the vote, even in a deep red state with only one under-funded third-party opponent whom he dared not debate or even acknowledge.

That outcome may explain why Cotton fears and loathes the idea of voters ranking their candidate preferences and making those preferences count,  instead of just heaving a sigh and ticking the box next to whatever supposedly lesser evil one of two parties presents for coronation.

The “major” parties’ shared monopoly on ballot access, debate inclusion, gerrymandering, etc., combines with “first past the post” plurality elections to guarantee political careerists like Tom Cotton the paychecks and power to which they consider themselves as entitled as George III is to his newly acquired throne, crown, and scepter.

Changes that better reflect voters’ priorities and make it more difficult for swamp creatures like Tom Cotton to cling to undeserved power are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As the world knows, the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8 at the age of 96, kicking off weeks of national mourning and ceremonies of transition.

Fewer noticed the passing, the day before, of American actress Marsha Hunt — whose film career began in 1935, and who starred opposite such names as John Wayne, Mickey Rooney, and Laurence Olivier before getting caught up in the McCarthy-era “blacklists” — at 104 years.

While these two women came from different countries and backgrounds, and took wildly different career paths, I’m struck by what they had in common with each other that few of the rest of us can even remember, let alone really understand.

They both lived through the Great Depression, World War Two, the Cold War, and the reorientation of global politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union (which was itself younger than Hunt!).

Most of us know those events only from literature and film (perhaps including Hunt’s None Shall Escape, the first movie about the Holocaust) or, if we’re lucky (and a little older than average ourselves), the oral recollections of our parents or grandparents.

The median global age is around 30. Half of humans now living can’t remember a world before the World Wide Web.

Marsha Hunt and Elizabeth II were adults before television became common and before most households even in “developed” countries had telephones, let alone telephones that could be carried around, take photos, and run sophisticated computer applications.

Between the two of them, they watched most of cultural, economic, political, and military water that ran under the bridge of the last century, a bridge we now find ourselves stranded on far side of without much living memory of where we came from.

Is “institutional memory” a substitute for the real thing? I don’t think so. While the Renaissance-era clothing and trumpet-blowing of Charles III’s ascent to the throne — or for that matter, a film retrospective of Hollywood’s “golden age” —  may be interesting and engaging, we remain trapped in the same tired old cycles of culture, politics, finance, and war that made the 20th century as horrific as it was innovative. We benefit from the advancements, but keep making the same mistakes.

Elizabeth II and Marsha Hunt may have been makers as well as observers of those mistakes, but we’re poorer for their passing: They’re no longer around to remember the mistakes for us, leaving us likely condemned to repeat them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY