Once again, Gavin Newsom has a disaster of epic proportions on his hands. This time it’s California’s fast-food minimum wage law, which went into effect on April 1. The union-backed law mandates a shocking $20-an-hour minimum wage, the equivalent of…

Without a confirmation vote by the U.S. Senate, acting Labor Secretary Julie Su can remain in her post atop the Labor Department, according to a Sept. 21 ruling by the Government Accountability Office. “As the Deputy Secretary of Labor, Ms. Su may…

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has embarked on what some are calling a “Make America California Tour.” As the governor recently claimed, large majorities of American voters, including 63 percent of Republicans, support California’s new law to fight “gas price gouging.”…

SACRAMENTO, Calif — Only three years ago, California’s Democratic legislators stumbled upon an amazing “easy button” idea for boosting the wages and benefits of ride-share drivers and other independent contractors. Apparently unaware of the economic concept of “unintended consequences,” they…

Sacramento Nearly 40 percent of cargo shipped into the United States enters through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but container ships — which typically unload quickly and head back to Asia — are backlogged dozens deep and…

At the onset of the COVID-19 shutdowns, Gov. Gavin Newsom raised eyebrows by repeatedly calling California a “nation state,” which usually refers to sovereign and largely homogenous countries with their own standing armies. California is wonderfully polyglot and, last time…

Sacramento During my years at the libertarian Freedom Communications newspaper group in the 1990s and 2000s (including the Orange County Register), we never endorsed political candidates based on the idea that it’s too difficult to reliably predict an individual’s behavior. I’ve…

Sacramento Every legislative session, it’s the same old story. Lawmakers propose a host of new regulations, taxes, and spending programs — and the rest of us yell and complain, then resign ourselves to the new reality. We’ll need to pay…

Sacramento The beauty of federalism is it allows individual states to try various public-policy experiments and then allows people in other states to sit back, observe the results, and decide whether or not they want to embrace similar policies. Based…

Sacramento When Jerry Brown became governor yet again in 2011, I warned my conservative friends not to be too upset at the prospect. “It’s not going to get any better than this,” I’d say. Indeed, Brown’s final eight years in…