How dumb to you have to be to be a liberal? Liberals only seem to support free choice when it kills a living person, see abortion. Robert H. Frank, moron, who for reasons unknown to modern man, is employed as economics professor at Cornell, wants to wage war on Black Friday.
Aside, I quipped during Thanksgiving, that human has the innate ability to turn anything into a competitive sport, both men and women included. An glimpse into the competitive [blood] sport of shopping, video;
Hat tip video: Ed Morrissey, Hot Air [1]
As for me, I take a live and let shop attitude. If you don’t like competitive shopping on Black Friday, don’t. On the other paw, Frank seems to be mortally offended that some people would choose to shop on the day after Thanksgiving, from New York Times [2]:
These costs might be worth bearing if they led to even larger gains. But when all outlets open earlier, no one benefits. Few people actually want to shop in the wee hours, and the purchases that do occur then are presumably offset, dollar for dollar, by reduced sales during normal business hours. Even the shoppers who turn out for early openings seem motivated primarily by a fear that others might snap up bargains before they get there. But if all stores opened later, there would be no fewer bargains than before. In short, we have a classic collective action problem, an arms race.
Black Friday (or, more accurately, Black Thursday Night) is only hours away, so it’s too late to do anything about early openings this year. But we can start thinking about what can be done to protect our future Thanksgivings. Many societies employ “blue laws” — laws that mandate closing times, usually on Sundays. But there is a simpler, more flexible, way to approach this problem. Inspired by the 9-9-9 proposal of the Republican presidential contender Herman Cain, I call it the 6-6-6 plan — an across-the-board 6 percent national sales tax (on top of any existing state and local sales taxes) in effect from 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving to 6 a.m. on Black Friday.
Reax from the Pundit from Poca, Don Surber: [3]
As he does not allude to any, I doubt there is empirical evidence to back Professor Frank’s assertion that stores deliberately remain open when “few people actually want to shop” just for spite or to inconvenience their employees — especially at the beginning of their biggest sales season when they simply lack the time to recruit and re-train replacements for disgruntled employees.
Certainly families are important. But so is shopping. Most Americans put in 40-hour weeks, not 10 or whatever a tenured economics professor at Cornell works. And most Americans work far longer than from August 24 to December 16 and then again from January 23 to May 27, the instructional year for Cornell in this school year.
Greedy one percent professors should not be begrudging some poor working class Fred Flintstone a few extra hours of overtime.
Frank argues that status is somehow bad for you, from Wikipedia [4]:
Frank is one of the first to highlight the perversities of what are known as positional arms races [5]. His book Choosing the Right Pond shows how important status is, and how much we pay for our status. Frank argues that the race for status is bad for society as a whole, as there cannot be improvement in overall status available, because every time person A rises above person B, the sum of their status remains the same. The only thing that changes is which person is where in the hierarchy.
He reasons that this race for status explains partly why increases in wealth do not increase well-being, or do not increase it much. If most of our earnings are spent on an empty game of status, we should not expect much improvement in quality of life
But on the other finger, status is good for Frank:
Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and a Professor of Economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He contributes to the “Economic View” column, which appears every fifth Sunday in The New York Times.
Given Frank’s likely schedule, or lack thereof, he has the luxury of shopping during weekdays, when the poor working stiffs are holding down their day jobs.